What I Had Before I Had You (3 page)

My sisters sit leaning back to back near some ratty boys they seem to know. Courtney lights a cigarette. I want to take her picture, but I don't have enough light. The tip of her cigarette glows orange in the dark. And climbing, that's Jake Ireland, with the beautiful hands. He is wearing jeans and an army vest that keeps snagging on nails and tearing audibly. I see that he has on bike gloves, and I feel relieved for his hands. Jake was in a summer craft workshop at the public high school with me two years earlier, and once he walked me to the nurse when I cut my thumb on the band saw, leaving scarlet pennies of blood to mark our path on the school's linoleum floors. He held my wrist up to stop the bleeding, his thumb in the cup of my palm.

A guy with long blond hair starts heckling him; I thought he was a girl until he spoke. “Chicken! Bwak, bwak bwak.” Jake's climbing has slowed. He cranes to peer down at us, and I can sense the fear in him, the tightening of muscles. He is only about forty feet up, but he struggles to hand-walk up the diagonal boards to the joints. His body hangs, dead weight. I wonder if he's thought about how to get down. I look at the pattern of boards and work out how I would do it, how I'd wrap my legs around and swing myself up. Everyone has silver flasks, but nobody is drinking.

Then Jake falls. He glances off a beam and drops five feet. He catches hold of a joint and hangs there. My gasp blends into the general noise, but one of my sisters—the taller, sharper one—turns and sees me. Then everyone is running to Jake, holding up arms, and he drops himself down from board to board to the concrete and grins, ashy, some weird kind of hero. He lies on the ground and drinks, and so does everyone. It gets loud, kids punchy with relief and adrenaline and whatever else they're taking in. Some boys monkey around on the low boards of the roller coaster, showing each other the right way to do it, doing it wrong. My sisters watch them. I move forward, magnetized. I have no plan.

Courtney climbs up the concrete base and tries to hand-walk up to the first joint but drops flat-footed. “Ow,” she says. “Laura, you try.”

Laura.

“Don't hurt your pretty feet,” says a ratty boy, and lifts off Courtney's sandal to massage the sole of her foot. My sisters seem so corporeal. And yet, who hasn't heard stories of ghosts passing among the living—girls in outdated dresses who ask for rides home from dances and get out at the graveyard. The long-dead boy sitting at the top of the hotel stairs bouncing his rubber ball. Right now, in the hallucinatory darkness under the roller coaster, my sisters seem equal parts real and unreal. I tell myself I am not afraid of them. I step forward and say, “You have to wrap your legs around.”

Laura turns her elegant face to me, tiger-striped by the shadows of the boards. She says, “So you do it.” She looks at me steadily, and I am sure that she knows who I am. This is a test.

I am standing by another concrete base, farther from the crowd, and the structure rises above me, stretching into the dark world. In a moment I am up and climbing, flip-flops kicked off. I use my legs to inch up the boards, and at the joint, I swing into a massive pull-up. I swing my camera to my back and wear the foam strap like a choker. My sisters are watching, and I am proud to have their eyes on me. I am torque, I am strength. I am almost to where Jake fell when the rest of the crowd notices me.

“Who is that?” someone asks, and they are all on their feet, looking up. I hear a girl from my biology class say the word “biology.” When I look down, I can see Laura and Courtney standing still and serious, watching me. Pleasure thrills down my spine; I can do what all these boys cannot. I climb. I can look down at the dark huddle of kids below me without fear, without imagining drop or impact, and that makes it easy. I trust in my arms and legs. Quite suddenly, I reach the top. Kids will tell me later that it took forty-five minutes. I stand on the wooden track, curling my toes into the metal grooves where the coaster anchors to the wood, imagining how I must look from the ground: a starless area of sky in the shape of a girl. I feel a whole-body quiver of joy.

Hoots and cheers rise from the ground. I think the noise will draw police, but from up here, I can see that the streets are dark for a mile. I lift my camera to my eye and take a few shots of the view and the drop to prove that I was here. From this angle, the lattice of boards below me looks unfurled, like a swaying length of lace. I shimmy and swing my way back down. I feel dizzy as my toes touch the concrete, not because of the heights but because everyone is looking at me. My sisters are gone. They led me here, to do this. They wanted me to be here.

The upperclassmen slap my back and ask my name. “Olivia.” They say it like they are going to say it again. They say, “Wow, fucking rad, were you scared?” I flash a smile and say nope. Someone gives me swigs from a flask, something hot and toxic that I will try to find for years afterward but never will.

Kandy Williams steps out of the crowd and smooths my hair behind my ears with her long black-lacquered fingernails. “You'd look good with bangs,” she says, chewing her lip thoughtfully. “So, what are you, a virgin?” One of the older girls claps her hands and bends over, laughing silently. I stumble backward a step and wish I hadn't. I don't speak this language yet. Kandy's face blooms with pleasure. “You are!”

A girl with dark curls and pale, finely cratered skin punches Kandy on the arm and tells me, “She's just fucking with you, she does this to everyone. I'm Pam. You go to Burling, right?”

“Yeah.” Pam is looking at me kindly, and there is something to the glances of the kids watching, like they have seen this before. Something almost jealous about the girls. Jealousy means you're getting something good.

Kandy points at me. “You. The Emerald. Eleven. Friday.”

“A
.
M
.
?” I ask, and they laugh.

LATER I TRY
to sleep, but I am too excited. It infuriates me that my mother should choose this particular moment to be gone. I have things I need to ask her. If I am going to see ghosts, I need to know the rules. She will be so happy, and so proud, to welcome me into my gift. I can hardly wait to tell her. There is her pink bathrobe on its hook; there is her Joni Mitchell in the record player. The shower drain is full of her hair.

My mother's genius runs on a schedule. She keeps a chart labeled
Divine Energies
and amends it constantly, adding color-coded lines of rise and fall:
tides, zodiac, holy days.
Where the lines converge at the top of the grid, her psychic convictions run strongest. The overall effect is a kind of braided sine wave, the troughs corresponding to her lowest times. Then, I'll find her in the nursery, staring at the crib, knuckles white on the wooden frame. “Where are they?” she'll ask me. I'll make her coffee and sit with her watching TV until she falls asleep, and then I'll take her sandals off, lift her ankles onto the couch, and leave her.

She is always adding new factors to the chart, trying to make her patterns of mood into an exact science. When she is most powerful, she doesn't sleep at all. Gardens bloom in the backyard, stacks of library books appear and disappear on the end tables. Clients come in droves. Sometimes the cycles are slow—a few months here and there—and sometimes they are breakneck quick. A week. A day. This is not to say I haven't watched her fake a reading a million times. But when she is right—when she feels that shuddering rush of future—she is really right. Once she told a man he should never travel by air, and when he flew anyway, he died immediately of deep vein thrombosis. I have seen her diagnose illnesses that did not show through symptom: tumors, brain irregularities. And throughout the seventies, she had recurring nightmares that made no sense until the Jonestown massacre, and then she described things about Jim Jones and his adherents that she could not have known and which have since been proved true.

I never doubted my mother's authority over the world. But when I reached the questioning age of eight or nine and began to come up against the brick wall of her certainty, I realized that I would always be wrong by default. She was right about Jim Jones, so she must also be right about how best to knot fishing line and how to train a dog. She must know the most perfect way to peel an apple; there was no room for any innovation of mine. I could never cast a deciding vote in our house; all our decisions came from above, transmitted to my mother by God or by instinct. Though I practiced for months, she wouldn't let me sing in my fourth-grade winter concert; she was sure something terrible would happen. I heard no such reports in school the next day, but perhaps my absence prevented some tragedy. I had to trust her intuition. There was no alternative.

IT IS ONLY
Wednesday, and I don't know what to do with myself. Without my mother telling me what to do, I bolt around, making messes. I spend a lot of time on the boardwalk, dreading ghosts, hoping for ghosts. I spot James at a seafood restaurant with his real family, two little boys with cocktail sauce on their chins, one crying. A wife with short hair and spider veins creeping up her white thighs. They are seated in a chicken-wire-enclosed patio area. I stroll back and forth outside, making myself obvious, clasping my hands behind my back, until James goes inside. The wife eyes me critically.

James and I rendezvous on the other side of the restaurant.

“You can't do that.” I think he might really be angry this time. “You know you can't do that. You look terrible. Have you eaten? Do you need groceries?”

“
You
look terrible.”

“Is there something that you need?” he asks me, scanning the restaurant parking lot fearfully. There is. I need to tell someone.

“I saw my sisters,” I venture.

“Olivia—”

“And they're grown up. I mean my age, or a little older maybe. Their names are Laura and Courtney. I talked to them.”

“Slow down,” he says, maddeningly slowly. He pockets his hands. “Have you been sleeping?” he asks me. “Have you taken a shower?”

“James,” I say, trying to draw his focus in with my hands, slicing the air with my fingers like he is a plane I am directing down the runway of focus, “I can see them.”

“How do you know they're your sisters? Did you ask them?”

“No.”

“Maybe you should make sure before you get yourself worked up,” James says, backing away. “I'll come by this weekend, okay? You go home and hit the hay.” He turns and hurries back toward the restaurant. I stand, considering. When I pass the restaurant patio on my way out, James is trying to get the little boys to stop crying. The wife's cardigan is draped over her empty seat.

I SEE MY
sisters for a third time. Blanche pulls and whines at the end of her leash. I am hanging out with my favorite of the boardwalk junkies, Stan the Deserter, who is full-steam-ahead ranting about Reagan to anyone who will listen. Sometimes I take photos for him and develop them for free, photos of him with upside-down flags and X'ed-out photos of generals, and he sets them up all around him and sits here waiting for audiences. Today he is talking again about the boy he killed, a twelve-year-old Lebanese boy with, he says, the face of Jesus Christ, who follows him everywhere, ten feet behind.

I am here also because we are at the best spot on the boardwalk, the corner by the central ramp, where everyone passes through on their way to where they're going. I create my sisters again and again in other girls' auburn hair, other girls' lanky stance or sandy limbs. Each disappointment strings my nerves tighter. I clutch my camera. My mother will come back eventually, and when she does, I need to have proof of what I have seen. How sad it is, I have begun to think, that she can't see how her daughters have grown.

Stan packs up at four, and I still haven't seen them. The sky is white and swollen with rain. The boardwalk has cleared out in anticipation. I walk Blanche down past the southernmost stretch, heading out for the dismal private beaches, where the rich people swim so rarely that they don't note the occasional dog pile, and I let her run free. Just when I have despaired of finding my sisters, there they are.

They are fighting in the depression just beyond the last turnstile, where feet have trampled the sand and cigarette butts hard as concrete. Their shorts and T-shirts are filthy. They pull each other's hair and grind their heels into each other's stomachs, pound each other down into the sand. It looks more like animal play than like a real fight. They grapple and fall.

I crouch behind a stand of beach grass in the lee of a sheltering dune, and I take pictures. The click of the shutter sounds so loud in my head that I worry my sisters might startle, but they don't. I look around for some other witness, someone to tap on the shoulder and ask that craziest of questions, “Can you see them, too?” But there is nobody.

I make myself stand and approach them. I am going to ask them who they are. My breath comes shallow, my armpits damp. I'm afraid, though I don't know why I should be, and I'm embarrassed. Now I know what I didn't know then, that the most frightening possibility was the one I hoped for: that they should say yes, we are indeed your sisters, we are following you through life and you will never be alone. It is safer to live with the possibility that you are wrong than the certainty that you are crazy.

Blanche sees my intention and enthusiastically preempts me, bounding into my sisters' fight. They shriek with confusion and come apart, legs and arms flailing, dog everywhere, joyful and unwelcome. They see me. Laura says something to Courtney, something that I can't hear. They scramble to their feet, sand sheeting from their clothes. They look at me and then turn and run away.

I'm too surprised to give chase. As they tear off into the distance, I see that they would have outrun me anyway. They are lithe as cheetahs. Blanche trots back to me, pleased with herself. I rub her velvet ears and sit down and cry a little bit; nobody can hear me out here, and it is all too much.