The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (10 page)

Lily wanted to cradle the little girls she remembered, to comb down the fine hair on their soft heads. Mabel opened her eyes. “What is it?” she said.

“Why didn’t Grandpa and Grandma Rollow take us in?” was all Lily would say. Though her grandparents’ backyard at 4214 California was surrounded by a brick wall, Lily could sit in the cleft of a tree and hear the tiniest sounds of other lives lived: the clattering of silverware as a family ate their breakfast at the table; the squeak of a trampoline.

“What? When?”

“Before,” Lily said. “Didn’t they want us? Why didn’t they fight to have us . . . like some people fight over children?”

Mabel yawned and rolled her eyes like the answer was ridiculously simple. “How could they?” she said. “Their son had just killed himself. And don’t you remember how we looked? We were pathetic. Your lips were all chapped all the time, and you kept biting the dry skin off them, and then they’d bleed. And I was so skinny and wasn’t eating anything. How would you have liked it? Looking at us like that every day?”

Lily sat on the edge of the bed. “There should have been more done for us,” she said.

Mabel sat up in bed and gently pushed Lily’s hair back behind her ear. She ran her thumb across Lily’s cheek, like wiping away tears.
Come to Mexico with us
, Lily was tempted to say at the touch. But Lily had to simply leave, without one single word. Lily would wait for Mabel to go back to sleep so that Mabel would wake in the morning and find Lily gone. She loved Mabel, but someone had to be left behind. Lily looked at the words she’d written on her hand—Lily needed to be alone with her mother and her list of difficult questions.

LILY HAD BEEN SAVING
for months to rent an apartment, dropping her tips into a tin she kept beneath her bed. She took the money, and they headed down the interstate. Jordan drove twenty miles without speaking as Lily lay her head against the headrest and watched out the side window. She felt comforted by the squares of light in the distance, the lit-up, yellow windows of farmhouses. But just a few hours from home, and a few hours from the Colorado/Nebraska border, after Lily had slept for miles, a tire of Mrs. Bixby’s car blew on an exit ramp.

“Good thing we slowed down,” Jordan said, as they sat cockeyed in the Monte Carlo. He’d pulled off the interstate to get gas. “If that thing’d popped when we were going eighty, we might have rolled to Mexico.”

It was only after Jordan made this point that Lily panicked. The whole accident had been gentle, forgiving, as if a congregation of angels had slowed the car. Angels or maybe her father—reckless in life, but now watchful.

“I’m not getting out,” Lily said as Jordan attempted to change the tire. Outside, it might as well be raining knives. All the newspaper clippings that Mabel had left on Lily’s pillow over the years, all the stories of last slipups, retold themselves: a smart man choking on a fish bone, a boy intending to just flatten a penny on a railroad track, a little girl who trusted her father in a river.

WITH A CAN OF RED SPRAY PAINT
, Mabel leaned out an upstairs window and wrote the words
THIS JUNK SHOP FOR SALE
on the side of the house. She ran downstairs and into the front yard to check her work. Though crooked, the words would be fairly visible to the passing cars of 1-80 a mile or so away. She kicked off her sneakers and sprayed them red then leaned back to sit in the scoop of the large satellite dish. A speck of a spider made Mabel’s ankle itch. “Don’t you know who I am?” she said to the spider as she reached down to crush it with her thumb. All the last week, she’d been running into cobwebs and plucking them from her skin and her hair. She’d catch glimpses of the webs, a shimmer of color out the corner of her eye, only too late. Though she was angry at Lily for leaving without telling her (all Mabel had found was a note Jordan had left next to the cash register—a doodle of a twirling-mustached man in poncho and sombrero
beneath the words
Off to Mexico
and above
Don’t tread on me)
, Mabel had been pacing the house, from worry mostly. Lily had always had higher expectations for things; she was bound to be terribly disappointed in their mother.

Mabel nestled up in the dish, and she looked off to a neighboring farm, to Mrs. Maroon planting tulips in the sorghum field. Mrs. Maroon and her husband had decided it wasn’t worth the work of planting and harvesting a crop this summer, so she was extending her flower beds; she’d bought six hundred tulip bulbs and a special device for the end of her battery-powered drill that allowed her to dig holes quickly and easily. Mabel worried that Mrs. Maroon had gone a bit wacko from the struggles of the farm, but what a divine madness, she thought. Uncontrolled tulip planting.

Soon, Mabel promised herself, she would actually be glad Lily and Jordan had left, and she wouldn’t care if they didn’t come back for weeks. She wouldn’t sit around and wait for them, and she certainly wouldn’t follow them. She would change her life instead. In the help-wanted section of the paper had been an ad for an assistant at the grain elevator for the longer hours of harvest. Mabel had always liked all the nighttime activity of the cold autumn weeks. As a girl, she had frequently sat up at her bedroom window watching the lights of the combines across neighboring fields, listening to the comforting roar of the engines and the rattle of trucks passing on the road after dark.

Mabel lay her head back and considered herself in other incarnations. She thought she might like to do something
selfless for a time, like a woman she knew named Betty who looked after things in the Alzheimer’s ward of the hospital. Mabel frequently brought Betty whatever Beanies she picked up cheap at flea markets, and they had lunch in the nurse’s station, watching the old folks in the lobby through the tall glass windows.

Mabel would miss the shop and her life among the junk. She closed her eyes and pictured the paint-by-numbers and framed hook-a-rugs on the wall and the junk jewelry locked up in its glass case.

Business had improved a bit at the secondhand store after a recent discovery; an antique dealer bought a ratty blanket that had been draped across the top of the upright piano for years. Mabel got eleven bucks for it, which she had thought a great sale considering the blanket was threadbare and riddled with burns. A few weeks later, the local newspaper carried a story trumpeting the dealer’s selling of the blanket, an Indian relic of ceremonial purpose, for $50,000. People trickled in then, investigating all the dustiest tchotchkes, scrutinizing every costume jewel and wineglass and cardboard print in gilded plaster frame.

Mabel took advantage of the new interest in the shop by scratching French-sounding names into the paint at the bottom of cheap vases; on the title page of an old copy of
The Sun Also Rises
she wrote
FRANCIS
—
THANKS FOR THE GREAT TIME IN GREAT NECK
.—
ERNIE
; on every porcelain thing marked with “Japan” on the bottom, Mabel stamped “Occupied” above it and quadrupled the price. She even practiced
an elaborate trick she learned from an underground antiquing newsletter: she mixed baby powder and automobile paint, then coated an old rocker or an old trunk with the mixture. She’d light the piece and let it burn a minute, to give it the look of something centuries old.

Nobody fell for the more obvious forgeries, but many altered items were sold; people would approach Mabel, fretting over particular pieces of junk, biting their lips, afraid of questioning authenticity and calling attention to the possible great worth. So she never felt guilty about her deceptions because the buyers had come with their own deceptive schemes—a husband and wife would stand whispering over something like the mock authentication papers of a Tiffany lamp knockoff, then decide to quietly pay the low asking price. They all hoped to get their own pictures in the paper praising brilliant thefts, their ability to recognize the rich histories of things broken or torn.

Suddenly Mabel’s hands felt lighter, unencumbered, and she realized she was no longer wearing the ring Jordan had slipped onto her finger in The Red Opera House. Where did I take it off? she wondered, and she worried that the ring was lost. If Lily happened to call, Mabel would say, “Tell Jordan I can’t find the ring he gave me.”

Mabel slid from the satellite dish as Mrs. Cecil, who’d once been the town’s undertaker, drove in to the driveway, pulling up next to Starkweather’s Packard. Mabel felt embarrassed by the red words on the side of the house. She didn’t want to sell the shop; she just wanted to punish Lily and Jordan,
wanted to worry them when they returned on the highway, with a bright red sign that announced they’d ruined everything. “Do you still have the extreme unction box?” Mrs. Cecil called to Mabel as she stepped from her car.

“The what?” Mabel said.

“The old box that used to hang on my wall,” Mrs. Cecil said. Ever since retiring from the funeral business a year or so before, Mrs. Cecil had been selling Mabel her antiques one by one, only to return a few days later to buy each one back. Mrs. Cecil was a beautifully preserved old woman, the shriveled, spotted skin of her hands the only sign of her great age. She was stately in her pearls and cameos and silver buckles. Her white hair was smoothly upswept, with the palest tint of blue.

Mrs. Cecil had prepared Mabel’s father for a closed-casket ceremony, but Mabel had never felt uncomfortable around her. Mrs. Cecil had long been a friend of Mabel’s grandmother, and once when she visited years before, Mabel and Lily described to her the funerals they wanted. “Ringlets,” Lily had said, circling her fingers all around her head. “And the green velvet dress that doesn’t fit me anymore that I wore two Christmases ago.” Mabel had wanted to be buried in a rabbit fur coat she’d seen in a JC Penney catalog.

“‘This junk shop for sale’?” Mrs. Cecil read aloud.

“Not really,” Mabel said, but looking up, she was no longer embarrassed. She decided she liked the crooked letters marking the house. The words might lend her life some mystery, Mabel thought. Everyone who drove by would wonder and
worry about all that was going on within the walls. Lily had never liked people to know about the sad details of her life and had told many lies growing up, often claiming her parents were missionaries far away teaching heathens about medicine and God. Mabel, however, had basked in sympathy, speaking often of her father’s death and had even invented a sickness for her mother that required her to take the healing waters and vitamin-rich sun of a little town in Mexico. Mabel had at times claimed the sickness to be hereditary, and she had once given her best friend Cindy a list of wishes she was to mail to the Make-A-Wish Foundation in the event of Mabel’s decline (to
swim in the ocean with dolphins; to ice skate in Rockefeller Center, New York City
). Though Mabel hadn’t told such a lie in years, she sometimes felt this make-believe illness making her sleepy, causing her bones to ache and her teeth to itch.

Mabel followed Mrs. Cecil into the shop and up to a box hung on the wall. It was a shadow box with statuettes of Mary and the crucified Lord, and beneath the figures was a small, hinged reproduction of the Last Supper. “Behind here,” Mrs. Cecil said, undoing a hook with her crooked fingers and lowering the picture, “is the Communion plate and a bottle of oil for anointment. I don’t even know why I sold it; it’s a nice old piece. How much?”

“You can just have it back, Mrs. Cecil.”

“Oh no, oh no,” she said, taking her checkbook from her handbag and checking the price marked on the side of the box. Mrs. Cecil spilled some coins from her purse, and Mabel bent to pick them up. “Excuse me, sweets, I’m shaky as a
leaf.” It must be nerve-racking, Mabel thought, to live among the families of those you’d dressed and undressed and cleaned and powdered and sewn up for burial. She was probably frequently haunted by the ghosts of the living, confronted by the widows from past funerals. People could easily come to think her funeral home—its walls painted always the same pale blue, its rugs the same weave, its slipcovers the same flowered print—a monument to all their old grief.

Mrs. Cecil wrote a check, then lifted the extreme unction box from the wall. She carried it in her arms to the front door, stopped a moment, then stepped out. She then stepped back in. “When did you say Lily would be back?” she said.

“I don’t know,” Mabel said. “I haven’t heard anything.”

Mrs. Cecil looked around the house, avoiding Mabel’s eyes. The many rings on all her fingers tapped against the box in her arms. “When I drove up just now and saw what you’d painted on the side of the house, I knew I had to finally talk to you girls. To tell you before you move away.” She swallowed, and she licked her dry lips. “To tell you about what I took.” She put the box down and walked slowly to Mabel.

As Mrs. Cecil took something from her purse, something wrapped in a handkerchief, Mabel longed for her to reveal something stark and awful. Skin from Mabel’s father’s skinned-up elbow, the lobe of his ear, the corner of his mouth. This time she’d believe absolutely, not like with the suicide note. This time she wouldn’t doubt for a second, she promised herself. “I’ve had this in my purse every time I was here,” Mrs. Cecil said. “But I could never bring myself to give it
back.” Mrs. Cecil held out her open hand and lifted away the edges of the handkerchief. She held, not something horrible, but a small plastic panther. The toy’s purple paint had chipped from months of play. Mabel recognized it at the touch.

“It’s been in the back of my mind for years,” Mrs. Cecil said, pinching at the beads of her necklace.

Mabel studied the panther. Her father had ordered a small bag full of plastic jungle animals from an ad in the
TV Guide
—a bag of panthers and lions and elephants. She and Lily had not cared well for the panther in the few years they’d had it. It had been stepped on and gnawed on and caught in the vacuum cleaner.

Mrs. Cecil wiped her handkerchief at the sweat of her forehead and neck. “I didn’t think much about it at first,” she said, her voice a high crack. “I have to believe that any funeral director would have done the same. We have to be very particular about how we prepare the caskets for burial. Before the funeral, your mother had wanted to just look at your father in his suit. I advised her against it, even though I had done . . . well, a rather, if I do say so myself, a rather good job of repairing the head . . . as best as it really could be repaired, really. But that’s what she wanted, so I lifted the lid for her to look. Though Lily couldn’t see in, she was standing right there, and I saw her reach up and drop something inside. I didn’t think much about it. I just waited until your mother and Lily stepped back out of the room, and I simply removed it. That plastic panther. I simply removed it and put it in a
drawer. Then after the service, and the burial, after all the dirt had been filled in, I realized what I had done. Lily had wanted your father buried with that toy, and I had prevented that from happening. After all these years, Mabel, I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Some days it seemed like that panther was alive in the drawer, pacing back and forth.” Mrs. Cecil cleared her throat and picked up the extreme unction box. “I hope Lily can forgive me,” she said.