The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (6 page)

“Shouldn’t I at least go with you?” Mabel said, but she didn’t wait for Lily to reject the offer. “Shouldn’t we at least call her first?”

“We don’t have her phone number.”

“We could find it,” Mabel said, “or we could send a telegram. But you don’t want to do that, do you? You don’t want to give her any warning.”

Lily felt sorry for Mabel when she thought of her sitting alone in the house waiting for Jordan and Lily to come back. Mabel didn’t really have any friends, and she’d never had a good boyfriend. “Just let me do this, Mabel,” Lily nearly whispered. She took Mabel’s hand to scratch affectionately at the chipped green polish of her fingernails. “I’m only going for a few days. I just want to introduce her to Jordan. Just take a walk with her. I just want to know her a little bit. I just want to get to know her.”

Mabel pulled her hand away and stood from the table, brushing cake crumbs from the front of her dress. Silent, she walked toward the door of the bus. “Mabel,” Lily said. “Mabel, don’t be like that.” Lily didn’t go after her because
she knew Mabel only ever needed a little bit of time. Mabel didn’t like to cause worry for anything more than an hour or two. But when Lily saw that the Joan Armatrading album lay, still wrapped, beside the cake, she felt miserable for always disappointing poor Mabel. Lily tore off the tissue paper; she’d wrap it again later. She felt like hearing “Cool Blue Stole My Heart,” so she unplugged the Christmas lights from the extension cord and plugged in the portable record player. In the near dark, she squinted at the turning record, looking for the right groove that started the song. As she set the needle down with a thump, Lily heard tiny stones tossed against the glass of the bus windows.

“Are you through being an asshole?” Jordan said, when Lily came to the window. Lily nodded, as pleased as always with Jordan’s ease. She reached out the window for his cigarette, and he handed it up to her. She took a puff and handed it back. “Is Mabel mad?” he said.

“Yes,” Lily said. “I want to go soon, Jordan.” But she didn’t trust that Starkweather’s Packard would make it anywhere near Mexico.

Jordan reached up again and took Lily’s hand. “We’ll get the Packard tuned up,” Jordan said, “then I’ll take you to see your mother.” Lily closed her eyes, liking the sound of that. Jordan, though skinny and wounded, could look after her very well if he set his mind to it. Feeling a buzz from the Manhattan and from the sugar of the cake, Lily was ready to believe in whatever Jordan told her.

“Come inside,” Lily said.

Jordan returned to Lily’s side at the table, and they ate some more cake with their fingers, ignoring the plastic forks and paper plates. “I ruined Mabel’s birthday,” Lily said.

“She’ll be lonely when we’re gone,” Jordan said.

“Mabel will be fine,” Lily said, and she really believed it. It would be best for the both of them to have some time apart. “We’ve always been fine. We’ve been lucky, really. We’ve always had a roof over our head.” Jordan glanced up to the ceiling of the school bus with a skeptical half grin. “You know what I mean,” Lily said.

Jordan leaned toward Lily to lick the frosting from the edge of her lips, then went back to sit on the bed to pull off his boots. Still at the table, her back to Jordan, Lily decided to finally ask him some questions she’d been avoiding. The questions, the most obvious ones, seemed like things she should have asked months before, on the third or fourth date or something. But it had been much easier not to, to let his steps toward suicide remain nothing more serious than a vague mystery.

“Did you hope to die that day?” Lily said, just said it, sitting in the dark not looking at him. “When you cut your wrist?” He didn’t say anything for a moment, and Lily wondered if he was looking down at his scar, touching at it gently with his fingertip, tapping at it, uncertain it was his.

“Did I hope to die? Did I hope?” He said it snide, like it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. “No. No, I didn’t hope to die. No. Fuck no.” When Lily didn’t say anything, Jordan continued, less peevish. “I was really young,” he said,
though the slashing of his wrist had only been a year or so before. “Everything seemed like a little more trouble than it was worth.”

“You loved that girl,” Lily said. “Kate.” Lily wasn’t bothered by Kate or by the creased picture of her he still kept tucked in a pocket of his wallet. In the photo, Kate sat in a bay window in an outdated white dress that had to have been hand-me-down. The black braid of her hair lay across her shoulder, and her silver heart-shaped locket was open at her throat. Lily had never met Kate, but she respected her as part of Jordan’s heartbreak, part of why he was the way he was.

“When she said it was over,” Jordan said, “I thought about dying and thought about how if I died, I’d at least be something important in her life. It would change her forever, wouldn’t it? It got so I liked thinking of myself as a pretty girl’s dead boyfriend. I figured I’d be some ghost, and I’d watch her grow old and sad. I’d see her never quite getting over it all.” Jordan sighed, then began tapping his fingers to the song on the record. “But hell, yeah, I’m glad I didn’t die. She was kind of a toothy girl, really, and, you know, she didn’t really dance as well as she thought she did.”

Lily imagined telling her mother exactly what Jordan had said about not wanting to die, as they had one of those long breakfasts that last past lunch, as they talked about their days apart.

She went to sit beside Jordan on the bed. She pictured him wet and sleepy in the tub, his arm flung out in tragic gesture, his cheeks tear-streaked. A beautiful waste, Lily
thought, feeling dramatic imagining his blood
drip drip dripping
into a puddle on the peeling linoleum floor. A wasteful beauty.

Lily took Jordan’s hand and touched at the scar, and she knew that it was a bright pink declaration of life, no matter what he said about death and becoming a ghost—he’d cut only one wrist just minutes before his mother was expected home from work. Not only did Jordan not want to die, Lily realized, but he wanted to be begged to live.

MABEL AND LILY S MOTHER HAD LEFT
in the spring, a few days after Easter. They had gone to church that Easter morning. Their mother had turned religious in the few months after their father’s death and had pilfered the shop for all its sacred relics: the plastic dashboard virgins, the votive candles, the strings of rosary beads, the pictures of angels, the lives of the saints. Mabel’s grandmother had robbed many abandoned country churches over the years, prying shiny crosses from pulpits with the flat of a screwdriver or stealing panes of stained glass to put up for sale. Mabel had been with her at some of these churches and had wandered the graveyards, fearful her grandmother would come out with a shovel and start turning up dirt to get at a ribbon in wiry hair and to pluck a brooch from a rotting chest.

On the way back from Easter service, just as they passed
the
ANTIQUES
1
MI
. sign, a sandhill crane lifted its gangly body from the weeds of the ditch and unfolded into something enormous. For a moment, Mabel heard nothing, not the engine of the car, not the wheels, nothing but the flap of the heavy wings, like the sound of a sheet in the wind on the laundry line. Mabel’s mother tried to swerve away from the crane, but swerved into it, and its talons scratched the glass of the windshield. Mabel heard it hit the roof and roll across, and when her mother slammed on the brakes, Lily fell forward. Everyone was fine, though Lily had a few scratches from the sharp-edged dash. When they stepped from the car, they found only feathers and blood, but no bird on the ground or in the sky.

Mabel, imagining the crane broken and near death somewhere in the dried yellow weeds of the ditch, began to search for it. She picked up a stalk of milkweed and poked at the ditch, hoping to rustle the bird out. Before Mabel could find any sign of anything, Lily burst into tears. A drop of blood had fallen from the scratch of her brow into her eye, and her mother scooped her up into her arms and put her back in the car.

“We’ll come back to look for the bird,” her mother told Mabel, but Mabel knew they wouldn’t. Once they were back to the house, her mother would collapse into bed and would sleep until Tuesday. Mabel took one last jab at the ditch, then set the milkweed stalk at the edge of the road where she could easily pick it up again when she returned to her search. As they drove away, Mabel looked out the back window, wondering
what could be done for an injured bird. Mabel would need bandages, she thought, and a bowl for the crane to drink from. She would prepare a nest of blankets and down pillows in the back of the old Buick up on blocks in the pasture.

When they got the inconsolable Lily up to the bedroom, Mabel’s concerns switched to her sister. Mabel’s mother undressed Lily and dabbed the scratches on her cheeks and hands with a pale silver ointment. Lily’s gentle sobs dropped her into sleep. When their mother left the room, Mabel stripped naked in sympathy and ran her finger along the scratches on Lily’s skin, picking up some of the ointment on her fingertip. She dabbed the ointment onto a days-old scratch of her own.

Mabel smelled Lily’s sleeping breath—peppermint from the leaves she liked to chew. She whispered in Lily’s ear. “Tara’s dead,” she whispered, “Jenny’s dead . . . Sally’s dead . . . Brenda’s dead,” a soft litany of Lily’s friends and cousins, all still living and healthy. Mabel hoped to stir up nightmares in Lily’s sleep. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Lily would wake crying, and Mabel would hold her sister in her arms and stroke her hair.

Mabel blew Lily’s fine hair from her face, and she kissed her cheek, then her shoulder, then her naked hip.

Lily whimpered in her sleep, and twitched. Mabel ran her fingers along Lily’s stomach, touched at her knob-like belly button. Lily wore a rusty spoon twisted around her wrist like a bracelet, and Mabel ran her finger along its bend.

Bored with her own nakedness, Mabel went to the closet
for a robe. The light from the shop downstairs seeped up between the floorboards, and she touched her toe to the light as she crossed the room. She put on a tattered robe her mother had passed down to her, though it was much too big. She pressed her ear to the wall and she listened for the religious songs turned languid in her mother’s deep singing voice that broke and gave the songs an unintended intimacy—as if Jesus were someone her mother had known, someone she’d touched. But the house was silent.

Sitting on the floor, Mabel ate supermarket blackberries one-by-one from a bowl on the nightstand. The berries were hard and sour, but Mabel decided she liked them that way. It seemed grown-up to like the taste of things that tasted bad. She remembered sitting on her father’s lap, a cigarette dangling from his lips, and she’d closed her mouth around the awful smoke. She’d stolen sips from her father’s beer and thought it tasted of moldy bread.

Mabel was not Mabel’s real name; she’d chosen it after her father killed himself. Many nights her father had come home and had winked and said to her mother, “What’s cooking, Mabel,” though her mother’s name wasn’t Mabel, and she never cooked at night. He’d call her Mabel at other times, like when he thought the girls were in bed and no one else could see him or hear him, standing in a towel in the hallway after an evening bath. He’d call her mother Mabel and he’d put his hand in her blouse and he’d kiss her neck and whisper in her hair, his breath the smell of the anise seeds and baking powder he used to brush his teeth, the way he’d brushed his
teeth in his Catholic boy’s school. Though Lily and their mother never complained about calling Mabel by her new name, they did at times seem startled by the sound of it, would jump as if they heard Mabel’s father’s deep morning cough again on the other side of the bedroom wall.

Mabel’s father had been an insomniac, and Mabel had sat up with him many nights as he fretted and drank Alka-Seltzer for his nervous stomach. Sometimes they’d play rummy; sometimes he’d just talk to her, telling her about what he thought his life would be like someday. He thought he might like to take some courses and become a stage technician. He had played Mitch in A
Streetcar Named Desire
in high school, and people had told him how much they’d liked him in the part. But it was ridiculous to think of becoming an actor, he knew. So he’d hang lights for local presentations and plays, paint sets, and even sew costumes. Sometimes his eyes were red and wet, and he rubbed at them and sniffled, and Mabel never knew if he was crying or just sleepy. If Mabel would start to drift off, her father would make a pot of coffee and give her a cup with lots of milk and tablespoons of sugar. He’d go on about some other things, like how his parents always loved his brother more and how he’d done some drugs in school and how he’d wanted Mabel’s mother to have an abortion, but was now so glad that she hadn’t, because he loved Mabel so much and couldn’t imagine how things would be without her. But he did imagine things without her, again and again, as he described a life he’d have if he didn’t have responsibilities.

Mabel picked up Lily’s glasses from the nightstand and put them on, and everything in the room stepped forward and large into her sight. The black wardrobe, its doors gaping open, threatened the room like a cornered beast. The glasses gave Mabel a headache and she took them off and the room fell back again, everything, again, what it was supposed to be. Mabel wondered if Lily needed these glasses in order to notice the world at all. Mabel thought of her grandmother’s friend, a blind woman in black-lensed, octagonal spectacles. “I’m very blind,” the woman said just the day before, “but I know there have been changes in the atmosphere. In the mornings, I sense a difference in the light of my room.” Maybe that was all the impression life made on Lily, Mabel thought, an impression as slight as the shifting of shadow and color.

Mabel’s mother carried in a tray with two plates of pancakes. Lily loved pancakes, even for her dinner and supper. Her mother set the tray on a trunk and hesitantly touched Lily’s shoulder. “Lily?” she whispered, then cringed. “Lily?” Sometimes Lily slapped or kicked the person waking her. “Lily?” she whispered, even more softly. Her mother looked to Mabel. “Should I leave her sleep?” she said, and Mabel said, “Yes.”