Rainey Royal (12 page)

T
HAT DAY AFTER SCHOOL
she stops at the hardware store to explain about her door.

“You need a shim,” says the man, and shows her a thin, splintery wedge of wood. “Take it,” he says, pushing back her quarter. She can only get the tip in under her door. That night she goes to bed with the light on and stares at the doorknob. At around 1:00
A.M.
, the knob turns.

The door does not move.

The knob turns twice more. Then it stops.

T
HE NEXT MORNING, JUST
showered, Rainey opens the bathroom door. Her mother’s bathrobe is red silk with a wine-dark stain on the belly, and has a deep V neckline, and things look a certain way on Rainey. She could wear a laundry bag and make it look good; her mother has said it.

But Gordy, who leans against the banister outside the bathroom, white hair fanned out around his shoulders, does not appear to have laundry bags on the agenda.

“Do you mind?” she says, hanging back. He could be waiting for the bathroom, but she doubts it.

“I got your message last night,” says Gordy. “And I respect
it. I respect it. But let’s not act so aggrieved that we have to bar the door. All I ever do is say good night.” No one else is moving in the house. They keep their voices low.

Rainey crosses her arms. “Say good night when,” she says.

“You know when.”

He says it as if he were citing the grilled-cheese sandwiches. Sandwiches she eats. Sandwiches she is complicit in.

“You come in my room when I’m sleeping?” From the way he looks at her, she knows they both know that she knows. She waits for him to laugh at her. “Don’t you dare laugh,” she says.

He doesn’t laugh. “You have no right,” she says. She pulls back her hand and slaps him on the face, to see if it will relieve her of the horrible knowing feeling. It does, a little, though her hand must be burning at least as much as his cheek. His skin turns bright red. She wonders if he is really albino or just incredibly pale. He makes no move to slap her back.

“You sent me signals,” says Gordy. “You’ve sent me signals your entire life.”

Signals? She sends signals to everyone, all the time, even if the signals are submerged, like telexes in cables on the ocean floor. It’s what she
does
. It doesn’t seem to be something a person can learn; Leah is hopeless at it.

Gordy raises his elbows to block her hand. “You never said no.” He backs up toward his bedroom door.

Two flights down, the doorbell rasps. “You weren’t listening,” says Rainey, and shoulders past him and downstairs.
She opens the heavy front door to find Angeline, Irene, and a guy with eyes like polished black stones.

“Are you
Jay
?” She’s aware first that the high autumn sun is rendering her red silk robe translucent and second that Irene is holding the burned Barbie, scorched at the ankles and wrists where it is missing its hands and feet. “Sweetheart, you can’t bring that here,” she says.

She senses Howard before she sees him beside her in his tartan pajama bottoms, breath minty, hair wild. “Is this the boy?” Howard’s chest and abdomen are bare. His beard needs trimming. She hates doing it.

Jay straightens and says, “Yes, sir.”

“You told him.” Angeline leans in and squeezes Rainey’s arm. “You’ll love Jay, Mr. Royal. We didn’t wake you, did we? It’s after ten.”

“I don’t have to love Jay.” Howard scratches a sworl of hair below his navel. “All that matters is if my daughter does.”

“Your daughter?” Jay looks at Rainey as if she is the real reason he has come. “We were hoping,” he says, and stops.

“So you’ll listen?” says Angeline.

“To what?” says Howard. His gaze locks onto Irene and then on what she is holding. “I’d say you were too old for dolls, gorgeous, but you play rough.” Irene smiles uncertainly. Howard laughs and turns. “I’m going back to bed.”

“Daddy, wait.” Rainey can’t help eyeing the Barbie. Irene smiles at her and holds it out. Rainey shakes her head. Howard’s at the stairs. “Daddy, can you wait just
five minutes
?” she
calls. Howard waves at her without looking and climbs. “Three minutes? For me?” Howard is gone.

“Goddammit,” says Angeline. “You promised. You promised and then you ran out on me.” She strides past Rainey into the foyer and looks into the parlor. “If we play right here, will he hear us?”

Irene sidles past Rainey into the foyer, too, but Jay stays outside, holding his guitar case and looking at Rainey in the doorway, and she’s looking at him, too, the way his eyes gleam like fountain-pen ink, and his mouth looks hard and soft at the same time, and his chest tapers with elegance and economy. They only have seconds of staring in which to make up for all those years in which they have been strangers to each other.

“I know where you live,” he says finally, meaning he can come back alone to see her, but for a moment Rainey thinks he means
I know what makes you come alive
, and she thinks,
Yes, you do
.

“Come in and play,” calls Angeline, but Jay doesn’t take his eyes off Rainey.

“It won’t do any good,” he says. It’s a question.

“No,” she says. But she steps back so he can come inside.

Then, shocking herself, she shouts out to Angeline:
Sing
.

Angeline moves out of the parlor doorway.

Rainey watches her ascend to the third step and look up toward where Howard disappeared. She hears her voice, sweet and slow and big-throated, aching and full of blood like a heart. Angeline sings “Cry Me a River,” and her voice swells
the staircase. She keeps singing, and it draws Howard slowly to the banister and down a few steps from the second floor in his pajamas. Angeline sings, and they all stare at her, Howard from above, and Irene sitting on the bottom step with her neck craned, cradling the Barbie, and Jay and Rainey in the foyer. Jay holds his guitar case in one hand, and his free hand is near Rainey’s, and she can feel his fingers laced in hers even though they aren’t touching.

Then he moves past her, sits on the bottom step by Irene, takes out his guitar, and picks at the strings. To Rainey’s amazement Howard sits, too, at the top of the stairs. Gordy pads down from his bedroom and leans against the wall behind Howard.

Angeline’s voice is invisible and everywhere; it is seawater that rises through the rooms. When she stops, the silence shimmers and contracts. Rainey would like to draw her now, in triumph, her breastbone high, her gaze aimed straight up at Howard like a light. She remembers the weight of Angeline’s arm across her chest.

Howard waits a few moments and claps his hands together slowly three times.

“Very pretty,” he says. “You should sing in the park. Try some open mikes. You’ll do very well.”

“That’s it?” Angeline stands marvelously erect.

Rainey reaches down, smooths Irene’s hair, smiles at her, and gently pries the Barbie from her fingers. The scalp is black, but the eyes are bluer than sky.

“What did you expect?” Howard rises. “You have to grow into that voice, my sweet. Live a few more years. Have your heart crushed.”

Rainey sees him wink.

“What about Jay?” says Angeline.

Irene looks at the floor.

“Jay will always be your accompanist,” says Howard.

“I told her we shouldn’t have come,” says Jay to anyone close enough to hear.

Angeline is still staring up the staircase at Howard. “Screw you,” she says softly, and her shoulders droop.

Howard beams down at Angeline. “Anytime.”

Jay is suddenly busy with his guitar case, and Rainey wonders if he will be staring at her again. Howard yawns and turns.

Rainey perceives Irene’s fingers closing into fists, and she tightens her own grip on the Barbie. She feels the seam of a hip printing onto her finger; she feels a tiny, fulsome breast pulsing into her palm. She feels the doll’s skin heat in her hand.

“You don’t know how to listen,” she calls, then flashes on Howard attending to Tina’s scales, on a clarinet lesson behind a closed door. “People throw money at her,” she shouts, as Howard disappears up the staircase. “Some girls are better than you think.”

BABY GIRL

Damien’s curls sweep Rainey’s face. He smells of last night’s communal dinner: chili with red onions and Cabernet. He clamps her mouth with his right hand and fastens her wrists with his left. He lives above Rainey in the former servants’ quarters and is a student of her father’s; he could wring blood from the cornet, Howard says.

Damien’s in her room because she slid the shim out when he knocked. He was upset about Howard. He’s on her bed because she drew her feet up for him to sit. At three o’clock in the morning, to talk. Just to talk.

She would never scream in her own house.

She feels like pieces of her body might be falling off, like turrets and bell towers from a castle. Damien stops, finally. He peels his hand gingerly off her mouth. Her teeth hurt. “Thank you,” he says, and zips. “Fuck, you’re
magnificent.” She spits at him. The spit lands on her quilt.

“You are
on the street
,” she hisses as he ambles toward her bedroom door.

With a hand on her doorknob, he turns. He wears a plain white T-shirt with a hole at one shoulder and lanky jeans; and under these he is thin and taut as a wire hanger. “Why?” he says. “Why would I end up on the street?” He has a look of serene entitlement, Rainey thinks, as if, having nothing extra on his person, he feels he can take what he needs.

“You patted your bed,” Damien says, already half outside the pink room. “You did that thing with your eyes.”

When she hears him on the stairs, she bolts down to Howard’s room. Her father refuses to turn on his lamp. “Talk,” he says wearily. She stands in his doorway in her nightgown, which Damien tore at the top, and hears a second body stir under the sheet.

“You have to throw Damien out right now,” she says, wondering which of her father’s acolytes is listening under the covers. “Please, can I talk to you privately about this?”

“We’re one family,” says Howard. “And we’re all asleep.”

“He just forced himself on me.” She knows she is backlit by the stairwell light, which she has switched on, and she holds the top of her nightgown together in one hand. “I am not joking.”

“Damien? My beautiful boy?” From the rustle she can tell he’s propped himself on an elbow and is peering at her. “I wasn’t awakened by screaming.”

“Daddy. He had his hand over my mouth.” And it is true that she fought, but it is a lie that she tried to scream. She wonders if Damien is already asleep.

“Oh, Rainey. Oh, baby girl.” Howard switches on his lamp and the light washes his face. To Rainey he looks ravaged by exhaustion and also, to her surprise, deeply sad. She locks eyes with Radmila, the Yugoslav flautist, who holds the sheet to the butter knives that are her collarbones. Radmila gives Rainey a tiny, apologetic smile.

Howard has not called Rainey his baby girl since she was a child. It is the winter of 1976, and she is seventeen years old and feels like she is five, standing before Howard with a dead sparrow and asking him to make it fly.

“It sounds like something went very wrong, baby girl.”

“Will you throw him out?”

“I’ll give him hell. I guarantee he won’t touch you again. He won’t even look at you on the stairs. Will that do?”

“No,” says Rainey.

Howard rakes his fingers through his hair till it stands. “Ah, Jesus,” he says. “Have you heard that boy play cornet? Have you
listened
? An artist can’t be a criminal. Listen. Young men get confused about yes and no. I wish girls could understand that.”

“Men get confused about a lot of things,” says Radmila. Rainey looks at her sharply, but there’s no smile.

Howard, half covered by the blanket, pins Rainey in the doorway with his gaze. “How did Damien get into your
room?” She is silent. “So you let him in,” says Howard. “Could that be half a yes?”

Rainey fingers the rip that Damien began. She will finish it when she gets back to her pink room. She can hear the sound already, long and zippery. When she gets to the hem, she’ll rip the gown the other way.

“Rainey. Did you let him sit on the bed?” Rainey says nothing. “Could that be another kind of yes?”