Rainey Royal (22 page)

Her mother said, Don’t ever let your father get his hands on this. It’s worth a lot.

Her mother said, I’m sure they have a telephone there. She picked her cigarette up off the edge of Rainey’s nightstand, inhaled.

Her mother said, Don’t let men push you around, baby, not with that body.

Out in the hall her mother said, Howard, I could have stayed. All you had to do was stop smiling at me from the goddamn doorway like I was too stupid to stop packing.

B
Y FOUR O
’
CLOCK
, R
AINEY
is late for Tina’s and Laurette is on a mission. She wants to store most of what’s in her boxes in the townhouse basement. “I’m talking about a tiny room,” Rainey says. “Ten boxes and some paintings. Not the
maps
, Laurette. Not the perfume bottles.”

Her father is going to kill her.
Bringing home more junk
. Laurette opens one carton after another; they disgorge towels and bead necklaces, hotel stationery and old packages of gauze. Rainey’s job is to pack it all up again, tuck the flaps in. Laurette can’t think this stuff is going to be saved. Rainey’s throat hurts from the dusty, papery air, and her head hurts from yearning. She wants to stumble upon copper-plated baby shoes; she wants to unearth a tendril of snipped-off hair.

From a box of tightly packed manila folders, Laurette pulls a black-and-white photo, a shiny eight-by-ten with one broken-off corner, and studies it long enough that Rainey looks up.

It’s a picture of the sisters. The girls stand with dripping cones at the beach; they are perhaps nine or ten. Linda beams at the camera, but Laurette looks anxiously to her left as if a stranger were near.

“My
mother
.” Rainey holds one side of the photo and runs a finger over Linda’s windblown hair. “You found my mother.”

Laurette tugs at the photo. Rainey hangs on. “Tell me more about her,” she says.

“We never got along.” Laurette stands with her hand out, waiting. “Linda was prettier. She was always laughing, even when nothing was funny. I would be off somewhere drawing. She got all the boys. There really isn’t much to say.”

Rainey nods. It sounds like her mother as an adult, too. “She never painted?”

“Just sewed.” Laurette reaches for the photograph, which Rainey holds out of reach. “She made her own prom dress.”
Laurette hesitates, and in the sentence she doesn’t speak Rainey hears,
I didn’t go to the prom
.

“She taught me,” says Rainey. “I can sew on the bias.” She smiles at her aunt. “I got the art from you, I guess.” The photo is as much a part of her as fingernails and bone. “I can keep this, can’t I, Aunt Laurette?”

“Keep it?” Laurette plucks the picture from Rainey’s hand and holds it at arm’s length. “Is that why we’re opening boxes? So you can take my things?”

“No.” Rainey feels the fine print of her face being read.

“You were going to take things from the boxes when you stored them.”

Rainey shakes her head. But how could she not take things from the boxes? She feels mute, her throat coated in dust.

“I always knew there’d be a thief. I just didn’t think it would be my sister’s child. Practically a daughter,” says Laurette. “Get out.”

Instead, Rainey comes closer. She touches Laurette’s face. Laurette takes a sharp breath, as if she might slap Rainey. And Rainey is gloriously prepared to receive it. She
deserves
it. But Laurette does not slap. Her eyes fill, and she says, “Go.”

Rainey stifles a tiny laugh in her nose. Of course Laurette won’t give her the photo. Rainey picks up the carton that holds the files, the one that yielded the picture.

“Put that box down,” says Laurette in Rainey’s mother’s voice.

“I’m digging you out, Laurette. You and the cats.”

Laurette plunges both hands deep in her crinkly hair. “I don’t trust you,” she says. “You have to leave.”

“But I’m like a daughter, remember?” She holds the carton out to Laurette. “Keep looking,” she says. “You know there’s more.”

Laurette holds herself stiffly. Rainey sets the box on the floor at her feet. “I’m not afraid of you,” says Laurette.

“Look inside,” says Rainey. “You’re going to see things you haven’t seen in years.”

Slowly, still rigid, Laurette gazes down at the box. She stoops and walks her fingers across the tops of the files, extracts, this time, a handwritten letter. “Howard won’t like it,” she singsongs. “This storage business.”

Rainey looks at the tender curve of Laurette’s back. She reaches down and gets into a gentle tugging battle over the letter. “Howard told me to come here. He said you would have what I need,” she says. “He wants me to be happy.”

She puts a tentative hand between the wings of Laurette’s shoulder blades. She imagines her aunt’s heart beating fast as a bird’s in the cage of her ribs.

“That’s it,” she says, holding the letter and photograph to her chest as Laurette dips into another file. “You can’t throw out a daughter. You know that, right? No one can throw out a
daughter
.”

H
ER MOTHER SAID
, L
ET
me show you the backstitch, strongest one there is. It goes one stitch forward, half stitch back. Funny, huh? Live your life that well, baby, I’d say you’re doing great.

THANK YOU FOR TRYING

Two nights before they see the suicide girl high over the grand staircase at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rainey comes to Leah’s for dinner.

Leah compulsively checks the fridge and straightens the rows of flan cups. She straightens the edges of her books. She straightens the plates on the table, perfects a space in the closet for Rainey’s coat, and drops into the love seat. Rainey is seventeen minutes late. Eighteen. Nineteen. And then she is there, prowling.

“You
still
live like this?” Rainey says, surveying. “You still have no stuff?”

“Like what?” Leah turns off the oven, where lasagna heats. She hates this oven. It’s harvest gold. Certain things are meant to be white, specifically these: sheets, appliances, moldings, towels, toilet paper, stationery, plates—though a
gold rim is acceptable on the last two. This from her mother, the decorator.

“I don’t know, coffee cups?” Rainey is snooping. “Bills? Catalogs? Ceramic poodles?” It’s almost charming, as if she urgently needs to know one riveting detail about Leah, and plans to shake it out of her white-box studio apartment. She grabs Leah’s sweater. “Magazines?” She shakes the sleeve, and it’s nice, this easy grabbing thing. Leah is suddenly grateful not to have stolen anything from Charles River Labs except a few Erlenmeyer flasks.

“Magazines are in the bookshelves.” But Rainey would remember: her
Scientific Americans
are in chronological order.

“I give up.” Rainey drops her purse on the love seat and walks to the bathroom. Leah listens to the sounds of Rainey’s absence. Flush. Running water. Pause for toweling. More silence. Lip gloss? The bathroom door opens.

“Jesus, Levinson. You
fold
it? It’s dirty and you
fold
it?”

“I like things neat,” says Leah. Is this affection? It feels like something she can bask in.

“In the
hamper
?”

Rainey eats two portions of lasagna and two of flan. “I was starving,” she says, finishing her flan, and Leah is pretty sure she means it.

“Let’s make it a ritual,” she says. “Let’s go have steak next week. My treat.”

Rainey wears less makeup than she did in school: a little sheen on her eyelids and lips. Vaseline, Leah remembers. A
strand of Rainey’s hair is caught in the shine on one eyelid, and Leah longs to extract it.

“No, only if I treat.” Rainey’s posture is perfect. It was that way in eighth grade. “Can Tina come?”

Leah feels the whole operation sinking. “You
can’t
treat. You said you’re broke.” Unable to stand it any longer, she reaches across the table and lifts the strand of hair off Rainey’s face. It’s very long. It might be a yard long. She almost regrets having to release it.

Rainey tosses her head like a horse dismissing a fly. She says, “I can manage. I’ve
been
managing.” She does not have a credit card. She still sells the occasional quilt. She does not have health insurance or an IRA. Leah learns these things because she
asks
. She asks because she feels compelled.

“You know, I could loan you money,” says Leah. “Till you sell some work.”

Rainey looks at her directly. “Stop trying to rescue me.”

“I’m not.” Heat flows into Leah’s face. Rescuing Rainey is exactly what she wants to do. She thinks they are close enough that rescue is okay. Is she offering too much, or is her face naked?

“Why don’t you commission a tapestry?” says Rainey. “That way I’d sell a piece of art, and you’d have something on the walls. It’s not normal not to have anything on your walls.”

Leah begins to speak and stops. She doesn’t want to commission a piece of art. That would be even-steven, if she
is going to be honest with herself. Also, she does not want anything on her walls.

She thinks of her mother, the decorator, who used to sometimes grow thin as a bone. “I feel like a vessel of light,” her mother once said, back when she wasn’t eating. Leah wants that feeling right now, to be a vessel of light, to draw Rainey in like a moth.

“I can’t afford it,” she says, “but you ought to give me some slides of your work. My mom might have a client who would order a quilt.”

“Tapestry,” says Rainey. She pauses. “You really think?”

T
HE NEXT MORNING THEY
meet for breakfast at Eat Here Now, and Rainey is cheerful enough to let Leah pay. She hands Leah a little yellow cardboard box that says
KODAK.
“These are my only slides. You sure your mother will send them back?”

“She’s my
mother
,” says Leah.

The box opens like a little drawer. Leah pulls it out and holds the first slide up to the light. It shows a complicated—mosaic, to her mind, or something like a kaleidoscope interior. “That’s all photographs, letters, things like that,” says Rainey. “And silver thread. The woman who owned those things used to sing. She died last year. It’s a memory piece.”

This sounds sacred to Leah. “I wish I could see it bigger.”

Rainey bites her lip.

“Don’t worry,” says Leah, “my mom has a slide projector,” because this sounds like a promising thing to say. She pulls out a second slide, a close-up of the first. Holding it up to the light, she makes out a watch face and a passport stamp. “These are exquisite,” she says, and she is just going for a third slide when Rainey touches her wrist.

“They might get sticky,” Rainey says. “I brought tape for the box.”

Obediently, Leah returns the slides to the little drawer and watches Rainey fastidiously tape both ends.

“Even one commission, my God,” says Rainey. “She’ll really show them around?”

“She said she would. She likes unusual things. She likes
the touch of the artist’s hand
.”

“You could save my life,” says Rainey.

After work Leah goes home and tucks the box of slides into a safe corner of her bookshelves.

Leah has offered money. She’s offered meals. Now, just taking the slides in her hand, she feels like a rescuer.

F
IRST IMPRESSION
L
EAH GETS
of the suicide girl is white shins and a pair of Candie’s platform sandals dangling over the limestone ledge, about twenty-five feet in the air above her.

The second-story ledge encircles the grand staircase at the Metropolitan Museum, and the owner of the shins seems to float up there, suspended over the foot of the stairs. Petite
and trembling, the suicide girl plants her hands at her sides as if she intends to propel herself down.

It’s 6:00
P.M.
A chamber orchestra plays to the lobby crowd, and Leah, on the ground floor beneath the ledge with Rainey and Tina, can’t stop staring. Around the girl, the gray fluted columns and balusters and the benchlike ledge she’s sitting on seem frigid as architecture carved from ice. She must be freezing, thinks Leah, who is bundled in a raccoon jacket, a cast-off from her mother. She grabs Rainey’s arm, ignoring Tina’s glance. Rainey gives her a sad little smile and lets Leah keep the arm. It feels good in Leah’s hand, resilient and lean.