Читать книгу The Shark Curtain - Chris Scofield - Страница 9

Chapter 5

Things I’ve Killed

I keep Mrs. Wiggins’s tooth in my bedroom dresser. It glows through my underwear when I open the drawer.

This morning its holy light pours down the dresser like lava and runs to my open closet where it puddles under the big plastic One Hour Martinizing bag. Inside it is the one-piece Big Bad Wolf Halloween costume (minus the mask) Mom told me to throw out two years ago.

Before Mrs. Wiggins died, I draped the costume over my shoulders and sat on the bed beside her, the two of us staring at the moon. She liked it a lot and, leaning against my long hairy arms, she smelled and licked the fake fur like it was a real wolf. Dogs are related to wolves, and wolves mate for life—I saw it on TV. It made her happy, so I didn’t throw it out.

I wish I had though.

The bag shivers and shakes with anger. It knows I’m scared; it knows I don’t want to have a tail. I quickly shut the closet, and push my desk and chair against it.

Things get out if you’re not careful, things get in.

I know that a glowing dogtooth, an angry Halloween costume, and a dresser that spews lava sounds like fairy tales, but since Peace Lake, weird stuff happens every day.

* * *

When Dad’s gone, Lauren, Mom, and I eat whatever we want for breakfast.

Mom makes herself a screwdriver, a cup of black coffee, and a stack of honey-drizzled Roman Meal toast she puts on a tray and sets next to her easel. She’s working on a picture of a bookstall in Paris, she even put my name on one of the bindings. Mom’s been smiling since she got up. When Dad’s away on business, she covers the kitchen table with newspaper and tubes of paint and works all day. This morning she wears her hair in a scarf, powders her face, and dabs her cheeks and lips with bright red lipstick. “Like a geisha,” she explains.

Lauren pouts until Mom makes her a geisha too.

While our mother paints, we eat cereal in front of the TV. I’m too old for Saturday-morning cartoons, but today is Halloween and Dad and I have a bet about the kids in the studio audience. I say there’ll be more pirates than cowboys, but he disagrees. Dad and I make little bets all the time. I usually lose my allowance to him, but it’s back on my desk next time I look.

Dad plays poker with “the guys from work” each Wednesday. There’re dice with his pocket change on top of his dresser, and he always has a pack of fresh cards whenever my sister and I need them.

Lauren laughs when Huckleberry Hound tells Quick Draw McGraw he needs a girlfriend. Boys make her giggle.

Mom doesn’t care what dishes we use as long as we clean up after ourselves. Lauren eats Trix with a wooden spoon out of a small saucepan; I eat Cocoa Krispies from the gravy boat.

I hear a howl from my bedroom closet, a long, lonely howl like in the werewolf movies.

Is it calling Mrs. Wiggins? Or me?

Dad says my imagination is a national treasure. Mom says, “People need all the quiet they can get after a traumatic experience.” What happened at Peace Lake was a traumatic experience, she explained. She even gave me a Valium to sleep that night, but the pill got stuck in my throat so I taped it in my scrapbook instead. If it were smaller, like the dust mop–looking protozoa thing we learned about in science, maybe I could have swallowed it and then peed it out the way Frieda passes a kidney stone “every time I turn around.”

The howl is for me. The old wolf costume is calling.

I try to ignore it but, when it howls for the third time, I can’t.

* * *

I’m human, and it’s fake fur and rubber, I remind myself as I hold the costume at arm’s length and tiptoe down the hall past the bathroom toward the back porch and trash can.

Lauren’s in the bathroom singing, “We will fight our countries baa-A-tles, in the air, on land and sea . . .” She loves the “Marines’ Hymn” and marches in front of the mirror, saluting herself, as she sings. She stops when she hears the floor creak beneath me, and peeks through the crack in the door. I walk faster.

“Don’t!” I try to warn her, but it’s too late. When she opens the door and steps out, the costume digs its claws into me.

“You still have that old thing?” She just turned eleven, but Lauren sounds like Mom. “You were supposed to throw it away. It has bugs.”

“It does not!” I say, but my words become a growl that rolls over my long black tongue, drenching my sharp yellow teeth in saliva, curling my lips like Elvis.

Usually Lauren’s stronger than me, and when we pinch, scratch, and pull each other’s hair, Mom tells us to “stop rough-housing,” and that’s it. This time is different though. This time the wolf skin crawls up my arm and when it wraps itself around me, I jump on Lauren, growling, barking, and snapping. When she tries to get away, I don’t let her up.

“Stop it!” She kicks and slaps, while squirming underneath me. “Stop it! Lily!” She pulls at the fur but it’s part of me now. “MoMMMM!”

Inside my Keds, thick hair sprouts on the tops of my feet, and pushes against the laces. The muscles in my arms and legs grow tight and strong. Two bloods pulse inside me now, one on top of the other. Dog blood. My blood.

“Get OFF me!”

She’s scared and angry, but for the first time ever I don’t care. I’m stronger than her and I like it.

“MmmOOMMM . . . MmmmOMMM!”

Suddenly, Mom stands over us, slapping at me with a bathroom towel. “Lily! Stop it! LILY!” And finally I do, freezing in place on all fours. Lauren crawls out from under me, crying and afraid. “For God’s sake, Lily,” Mom says breathlessly, “what’s gotten into you? ”

Lauren sits on the toilet lid and Mom looks her over. Thoroughly, too, like Lauren at the quarry and me at Peace Lake; like she’d forgotten something or left something behind.

“You okay?” she asks. There’s lipstick on her teeth.

Lauren nods.

Sweaty and panting, with the hairy hide twisted around my neck and shoulders, I smell like Dad’s BO after playing tennis. I must have bit my tongue; I taste blood.

“Stand up, Lily!” Mom barks, then reaches down and jerks the costume off me. “You told me you threw out this damn thing.” She looks at her hand. “Dog hair. That sick old dog slept on it, it’s filthy.” She catches her reflection in the mirror and quickly looks away. “The garbage truck will be here in the morning.”

I struggle to stand. “I’ll put it out!”

“No you won’t. I will.” Mom starts rubbing her forehead. “You’re not a little kid anymore, Lily. You could have really hurt Lauren.” I reach out for the costume but she throws it on the bathroom floor behind her. “You will never bring another . . . animal costume into this house again, do you understand me?”

“It’s not a costume,” I tell her. “It’s a werewolf.” It’s scary to say out loud, but she needs to know. “Information is power,” I add. I heard that on TV.

“It isn’t a werewolf,” Lauren says, wiping away a tear. “It’s a Big Bad Wolf costume.”

“I threw away the stupid mask!” I scream. My eyes are on little bedsprings that pop in and out of their sockets.

Mom pauses then looks at me with concern. “Lily?”

“She thinks she’s Mrs. Wiggins,” ratfink Lauren says. “She told me! She said she’s got Mrs. Wiggins’s blood inside her! It’s gross.”

“Shut up! I did not!”

“You did too. Liar!”

I am a liar. I did tell Lauren about Mrs. Wiggins’s blood.

I told Judy too, but when I swore her to secrecy, she laughed at me. “Who would I tell?” she asked. I immediately thought of her blabber-mouth girlfriend Karla who definitely would tell, and then Mrs. Wiggins would have to be dug up and tested for rabies, “and probably have her head cut off,” Judy said, and then I’d have to get really painful shots in my stomach that would hurt so much “you’d wish you were dead just like your dog.”

I lied about swimming at Peace Lake.

I lied about Aunt Jamie’s microscope too. I said I gave it back months ago, but I didn’t. It’s in my closet. Jamie doesn’t mind. When she comes to Sunday dinners, she brings me dead bugs, pods, diseased leaves, and strange wet stuff in pill bottles to look at with the microscope after she’s left. Things look different when you see them close up. Even black goop from Mom’s eyelash curler has teeth. There are tiny worlds with big monsters everywhere.

I hear clip-clopping outside, and look down the hall toward my bedroom. I imagine the hairy face of the werewolf popping up at my window. Behind him, in the driveway, an old gypsy woman holds the reins to a horse-drawn wagon. “There really are werewolves, Mom. They live in dark foggy places you can’t see from our house.”

The costume lies in a tangle behind her. “Monster movies,” she mumbles.

“Werewolves aren’t monsters. They’re normal people who—”

“I know what they are,” Mom interrupts. “I grew up with that nonsense, and I will not have it in this house.”

Lauren sniffs.

Outside, the gypsy’s horse poops on Dad’s new steam-cleaned driveway. The werewolf collapses in Mom’s flower bed, crying in pain while his spine stretches and bows like the land bridge we learned about in school, connecting the old world to the ice age and back again. The werewolf is changing into a man named Lawrence Talbot.

I’m changing too.

“Go to your room, Lily,” Mom says.

“It doesn’t matter if you throw it away,” I say quietly. “It’s still mine.”

“Your room, Lily.”

Lauren sticks out her tongue at me.

I’m sorry I hurt my sister, but it doesn’t matter how old or big I am—I can be a werewolf or the Big Bad Wolf or anything I want. It’s a free country. I’ll have to apologize and promise to do Lauren’s chores for a week, but I don’t care. Next time she goes outside to play, I’ll pee in her closet.

That’s what a wolf would do.

* * *

Mom runs a hot shower for me, and asks me to join her in the kitchen when I’m done.

I lean away from the sticky plastic shower curtain when I wash. Lauren comes in and lifts the lid to the toilet. “Hey finkhead,” she says. After she pees she turns off the fan, says, “Watch out for sharks,” and slams the door shut.

The bathroom is small and steams up immediately.

I can’t see past the curtain . . . where laughing baby Lauren sits on the countertop while Mom changes her clothes. It’s years ago and Lauren and I just took a bath together.

I’m still in the tub.

Winding myself tighter and tighter in the thick plastic folds of the large shower curtain, I make funny faces at her. She laughs and points her fat finger at me.

I.

Can’t.

Breathe.

“Isn’t she funny?” Mom teases, lifting Lauren into the air. She doesn’t look at me. “Lily is . . . so . . . so . . . funny!”

Lauren laughs.

I sit Indian style in the cooling bathwater. The curtain sticks to my forehead, the end of my nose, and my shoulders, and presses my arms against me, holding me in place.

“A taste of honey . . .” Mom sings with the radio. “A taste, much sweeter than wine . . .” Her back is to me.

I twist. I splash. I kick the side of the tub, jingling the metal rings on the shower bar. Each exhale makes the curtain crackle then steam up, erasing my view of Mom and Lauren. When I hold my breath, a little window clears in front of me, and I see her legs and apron strings. Inhaling, I smell bubble bath and the Pine Sol–scrubbed shower curtain.

Mom?

She giggles, pretending to bite Lauren’s stomach.

“Marv Tonkin Ford’s got the deal for you!” the radio blares.

“Shark shark bo-bark . . .” Lauren sings as she opens the door again. She flips on the fan. “Banana-fana fo fark . . . Better hurry up!” she says, brushing her teeth. “Mom’s making chili dogs for lunch.”

“Lily!” Mom finally cries and, putting baby Lauren on the floor, quickly untangles me.

Dad takes care of Lauren that night, while Mom sits on the floor next to my bed, smoking cigarettes and rocking back and forth.

My arms stay stuck to my sides for hours.

* * *

Mom’s on the phone.

“I told him to go. For goodness sake, go to Chicago, Paul. It’s the chance of a lifetime.” She’s talking to Mrs. Marks, Judy’s mom. “Of course, I don’t mind a few days to myself either.” She laughs.

I’m painting eyes and cutting them out for my Halloween costume. Cat eyes, doll eyes, human eyes.

“Lauren’s a princess this year. She’s in the bathroom doing her makeup. Uh-huh . . . Lily? She’s going as a potato. That’s right, an Idaho spud. She’s sitting at the kitchen table right now, making eyes for it. Then she’ll staple them to some brown butcher paper, stuff it with newspaper, and climb in . . . I know, isn’t she? . . . Uh-huh. Well, whatever else, we never doubted her creativity. What about your kids? . . . Well, of course she’s too old. Judy’s always been old for her age, hasn’t she?”

Then it dawns on me: I don’t want to be a potato. “I’ve changed my mind,” I announce. “I’m going to be a gypsy.”

“Just a minute, Connie,” Mom says, covering the receiver. Her smile falls. “A gypsy? Your potato costume is clever. Be clever, Lily. Strut your stuff.”

“But I don’t want to be clever.”

“Can we have this conversation when I’m off the phone?”

I start ripping up the eyes I’ve organized in piles according to size and type.

Mom sighs. “Let me call you back,” she says.

“First to fight for rights and free-EE-dom, and to keep our hon-OR clean,” Lauren sings, marching into the kitchen. Mom and I stare at her. Her tiara with red and blue rhinestones is beautiful and I like all the plastic flowers in her hair, but Frankenstein’s Bride must have done her makeup.

“I want to be the old gypsy woman in the werewolf movies,” I say. Without thinking.

“No! Absolutely not. There’s been enough wolf business around here.” Mom wets the corner of a dishtowel and begins wiping Lauren’s face.

“But Mom . . .”

“If you don’t want to go as a potato, you can stay home. End of discussion.”

“But . . .”

“The end.”

* * *

Lauren goes out with Rusty and Sherman, while I stay home with Mom.

Three adults in costumes come to our door before dusk. The man in a suit and hat with face and hand bandages holds out a UNICEF box. “The Invisible Man,” Mom smiles. “May I give an invisible donation then?” The quiet man shakes the tin box. Raggedy Ann and Andy stand behind him.

“Hi, Kit,” Raggedy Andy says in an embarrassed voice. It’s mean Mr. Marks, Judy’s stepdad.

Mom laughs. “I see she talked you into it. Very cute, Connie.” Raggedy Ann curtsies. It’s Mom’s phony voice. She doesn’t mean it.

The Invisible Man walks off. Maybe it’s the full moon. Dad said yesterday that Halloween on a full moon is a double whammy. “Chock-full o’ nuts,” he laughed.

After the Markses leave, Mom and I light the jack o’ lanterns and sit together on the couch. “I bet the lake seems like a long time ago now, huh?” she says.

“Sort of.”

“Almost four months. We’ve gotten used to life without Mrs. Wiggins, haven’t we?” She lights a cigarette. “Life goes on.”

“I’m sorry about hurting Lauren,” I say.

“Of course you are. I know you, Lily. You’re a good girl.” She takes a puff. “Are you sleeping better? I mean, since the lake?”

I nod. I lie. I don’t sleep much at all. My body feels different, even my feet wiggle like they’re running down the street without me, and I itch everywhere.

* * *

Lauren bet Sherman and Rusty she could eat half her sack of candy before eight o’clock, and she won. She also barfed so much it made her cry.

Mom assigns me to the last trick-or-treaters, and when Dad calls at nine she’s still in Lauren’s room, so I pick up.

“You won,” I tell him. “Two pirates. Three cowboys; triplets even!”

“What are the chances?” Dad laughs. “That’s seventy-five cents, Diamond Lil.”

I smile. He can’t see me of course. “I got in trouble today.”

“I know. Mom called earlier. Better now?”

They don’t know what to do with me.

“Yeah.”

* * *

Sometimes I like Dad better than Mom.

Dad didn’t tell anyone about Peace Lake, but Mom did. She told her closest friends and Aunt Jamie, of course, but she even called old friends she doesn’t usually talk to. Women she met in a writing class at Lewis &. Clark before dropping out “because I have nothing to say,” and the mah-jongg group she left because they were “a bunch of gossiping old hens.”

After tearful pauses, Mom ended each call with, “It was awful. I can’t talk about it anymore.” After Dad yelled at her for buying a whole carton of cigarettes, she didn’t talk to anyone on the phone for a week.

* * *

Sometimes I like Mom better.

At night, I hear her walk down the hall to the kitchen, take down a glass, and fill it with the last cubes from the ice bucket. The door of the liquor cabinet, over the refrigerator, doesn’t like to open; it’s stickier than the others, even after being cleaned. Daddy told me that once he put gum in the catch, a “gob stopper” he called it, to “tease Mommy,” but she pulled the handle so hard it knocked her right off the stool.

She didn’t fall last night. I heard her turn on the TV and sit on the couch. I imagined her lighting a cigarette and pulling her knees to her chest, to keep herself warm. I imagined tiny reflections of Johnny Carson on her freshly polished fingernails when she brought first the cigarette, then the wineglass, to her mouth.

Mom never watches more than fifteen minutes before going to bed. Sometimes, in the summer when she and Dad fight, she doesn’t watch TV at all. I hear the sliding glass door open and the clatter of a metal lawn chair on the patio when she turns it to face either the moon, or the newlyweds’ house. She calls it the newlyweds’ house because they’re always getting new furniture and cars, or taking trips to beautiful places. “Pretty girls get lots of nice things when they’re young,” she tells me.

* * *

After twenty minutes, I blow out the jack o’ lanterns and lock the front door.

When I listen in at Lauren’s door, everything is quiet; Mom must have fallen asleep too.

Back in the family room, it’s my turn to curl up on the couch and watch TV.

“A wolf? A gypsy woman? A murder? What’s going on here?” asks an old English guy with a mustache and pipe.

Poor Lawrence Talbot turns away, tears in his eyes, wringing his hands. Only a skinny flat-chested woman notices. She touches his shoulder and asks if he’s all right.

I scoot closer to the TV. Will he tell her he’s a werewolf this time? It’s okay if he does. Everybody likes Lawrence Talbot; he’s big and quiet and sweet, just like Hoss Cartwright. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone.

I don’t want to hurt anyone either. So I never tell Mom how, after the gypsy lady tracks the werewolf into the dark foggy woods and hides him in her buckboard, she drives the wagon right up to the movie camera and looks at me. Me. Lily Asher of Portland, Oregon.

Or how, after I go to bed, I pray that God won’t change me into something everyone is scared of. Even though that would make it even-steven because I killed Mrs. Wiggins and fair’s fair.

A few minutes later, Mom sits down next to me on the sofa. “Horror movies on Halloween, that makes sense. You tired yet?”

I shrug. “Do I have to turn it off?”

“Are you okay? You’ve had a long day.”

“I’m okay.”

Mom puts her head on my shoulder. “Why do things always happen when your father’s out of town?”

“I don’t know.”

Even though Mom smells like the regular stuff—cigarettes, wine and that special shampoo Dad says is too expensive—she seems different. Her body is wider and heavier, her voice sad and tired. If Mom isn’t herself, who is she?

Did Jesus kidnap the real Mom while I was in the lake? Is He buying her lobster dinners and new art supplies? Judy says a boy cat will eat his own kittens to make a girl cat come into heat again. Would Jesus eat Lauren and me?

What if He falls in love with her? “Everybody does,” I’ve heard Dad say.

Suddenly Mom bursts into tears. “Your father and I thought if you girls learned how to swim, everything would be okay. But if it isn’t one thing, it’s another. You’re struggling to . . . be yourself and . . . find your way, and then there’s the lake and Mrs. Wiggins, and even these monster movies—they get under your skin, don’t they? They get under mine.” She reaches for my hand in the dark. “I’m so sorry, Lily.”

Mom doesn’t usually apologize. “You didn’t do anything. Besides, I can still swim a little.”

“You mean dog paddle. Dog paddle! Like the whole thing with Mrs. Wiggins was some kind of sick ironic joke,” Mom sniffs. “If I talked less and listened more, if I kept an open mind . . . Jamie said I’m small-minded. I guess I am.”

“No you’re not.”

“And today? With the Halloween costume? Sometimes I think I have no maternal instinct at all. Jesus.” Mom glances toward the kitchen. The wine calls to her the way the costume called to me. “You and I are family but we aren’t even on the same page, sometimes. How can that be? Maybe if I didn’t . . . You’re the most interesting person I know, Lily. I could learn from you.”

Page? Interesting? Learn? “I’m not a book.”

Mom sits up. Her body stiffens when she says, “Of course you’re not.”

* * *

The next night, Dad comes home from the airport in a taxi, with new roller skates for Lauren, origami papers for me, and a big bottle of perfume for Mom. He tells us over dinner that “the newlywed couple is selling their house. Did you notice? How much are they asking?” He suddenly stares at Mom. “Jesus, Kit, you look beat.”

“Thanks,” she says, pinching her cheeks for color. “I am. We’ve been busy.” She tells him about our special lunch that afternoon. How she put out a lace tablecloth, and filled the brandy snifters with red Kool-Aid and frozen fruit. And made deviled ham sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and served us big slices of grasshopper pie with real Oreo cookie crust. “There’s plenty of pie left in the fridge.

“Good.” Dad smiles at Lauren and me. “Good. Sometimes I think our little house on Aiken Street is the only place in the world that makes sense. An oasis, an island. Asher Island.”

“Like Gilligan’s,” Lauren smiles.

“I get to be Ginger!” Mom says. She’s happy again. “What a figure!”

Dad whistles.

I’ll never get off Asher Island. Dr. Madsen, a.k.a. Dr. Giraffe, says to be patient—that I’ll be winning swim competitions again in no time, but I know better.

I don’t even miss it.

* * *

I wait until everyone falls asleep and enter my parents’ room. I smell their fear when they realize something or someone dangerous is standing in the shadows.

Mom is naked and I see her big tanned boobs when she sits up.

Dad’s brave, and when he jumps out of bed his protective blood makes a big whooshing sound, like the walk-in heart at the science museum.

He’s scared but ready to defend Mom. I pounce on them both. Lauren’s blood already smears my face; her body is in shreds in the hall. Her guts all over the fancy grass wallpaper and Mom’s new shag carpeting.

I wake with a start. My room is dark and quiet.

Dad’s home. Mom cut up my old Halloween costume and threw it in the trash. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said.

I touch my crucifix and feel a small patch of dog fur growing underneath it. Jesus died for our sins. What did Mrs. Wiggins die for?

I pull out the scrapbook from under my bed and make a new list.

The Things I’ve Killed:

1. Lots of flies and mosquitoes.

2. Peace Lake.

3. Mrs. Wiggins.