Читать книгу The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters - Timothy Schaffert - Страница 7

IN HER SECONDHAND SHOP, MABEL stretched out on the fainting sofa, feeling tipsy from the summer’s heat, not knowing, for a moment, if it was June, July, or August. She shook up a leaking snow globe, the white flakes settling in the laps of lovers on a gondola. Mabel had read in a book on antiques that the snow in snow globes was once made of sawed-up bone. Though Mabel was very young, she often pictured her demise, often hovered above her own Valentino-like funeral with women collapsing and broadchested men singing impromptu bass tremolo. She’d like to donate her skeleton to a snow globe maker, liked thinking of her remains forever drifting among the plastic landscapes of a souvenir.

Mabel watched her sister Lily put on lipstick in front of the mirror of the decades-old nickel gum machine. Sometimes Mabel wondered if she’d been separated at birth from her real sister, for Lily and Mabel shared no resemblance. In a fairy tale, Lily would have been the fair sister of goodness, goldilocked and rosy-faced, and Mabel the nasty one, made up of pointy bones and thin skin and a hank of black hair.

Lily wore only a thrift-shop bra, a pair of jeans, and thick glasses, without which she was only a few blurs from complete lack of sight. After one last drag from her Virginia Slim, she ground the cigarette out in the palm of a mannequin’s severed hand.

“I don’t know how you can smoke in this heat, Lily,” Mabel said. “Everyone’s quitting.” It had been a terrible summer, and the heat had killed a fifteen-year-old boy in the fields; he dropped dead from a heart attack at eight in the morning cutting tassels from the corn for five bucks an hour. The black-eyed susan by the railroad tracks had blazed yellow for only a week before burning up from the sun. There had never been a better summer for running away to someplace temperate, Mabel thought, fanning herself with an old Omaha World-Herald—TWISTER KILLS FIVE—the whirling dust of yellow paper making her sneeze.

Mabel and Lily Rollow lived alone in this junk shop in the country. Tiny hand-painted signs along 1-80 directed motorists (ANTIQUES 4 MI., ANTIQUES 3 MI.) onto Highway 34, then off onto gravel roads past a stretch of corn and bean fields and pastures overgrown with tall musk thistle. The gray house stood next to a large, outdated satellite dish in the middle of eighty acres of farm land long left fallow, a few miles from the little nothing town of Bonnevilla (pop. 2,900).

Lily held a tissue to her lips to blot her lipstick. The tissue, marked with the red shape of her kiss, floated softly from the tips of her fingers to the floor. Her boyfriend Jordan had called to say he bought a car and wanted to take her for a ride. At nineteen, he was two years younger than Mabel and a year older than Lily. He was sexy in his tight concert T-shirts and with a clip-on silver hoop over his left eyebrow.

Nights, Jordan came to Lily with gin in the hot months and bourbon in the cold. Even before she noticed his one scarred wrist, Mabel had seen in Jordan an inadequacy for the rough-and-tumble of the world. His breath always smelled of the cheapest wine; Mabel could taste it when she smelled it, a remembered sip stolen as a child at a funeral, and she yearned for its vinegar sting at her throat. Should he ever reopen the wound of his right wrist and this time die, she thought she might fabricate a romance between him and herself and confess it to Lily at the peak of her mourning. Mabel could almost feel that lie waiting in her mouth, hidden beneath her tongue like an unswallowed poison.

“It’s not just any car,” Lily said. “It’s Starkweather’s. Sort of. It’s not the ’49 Ford Charlie owned, but the one he stole from the Lincoln couple he murdered—the ’56 Packard.” Jordan and Lily were fascinated with the stories of Charlie Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate. Mabel’s grandmother had once told of how frightened she’d been those nights on the farm before they caught the killer. Everybody across the state was terrified, she’d said. All the teenagers were afraid to go to drive-ins or out in the country to park and neck. Mabel’s grandmother stood those nights at the window hearing thousands of noises coming down along the still and empty country road.

Mabel went to the dilapidated vanity ($75) at the front of the shop to riffle through the mail Lily had tossed unopened across the top of it. There was a letter from their mother who wrote from time to time of broken engagements and new loves. Their mother had left Nebraska more than ten years before, abandoning the girls at their grandmother’s secondhand shop then driving southwest, then farther southwest, and farther, until she had tail-spun off the map.

The return address on this letter was new. Their mother’s address, though always full of Spanish words, was always in flux. Mabel tore open the envelope, curious to find out if she’d married the old codger who’d made his fortune from selling sea monkeys and trick pepper gum in the pages of comic books. Her mother’s life after her father’s death had long seemed to have all the romantic posturing of a magazine ad for scotch, all foreign locale and men with gray mustaches whispering into the ears of young ladies. Her mother never wrote much in her letters, but Mabel felt invited to read between the lines for the exotic intrigue and secrets.

Even this month, as Mabel read of nuns and worship, as her mother wrote of being lost then found, Mabel still envisioned lascivious Mexican priests (as beautiful as the young Ricardo Montalban in the old movies Mabel watched during the day) and virgins stuck through with stigmata. “Look,” Mabel said, handing Lily the photo from the envelope. In it, their mother knelt at an altar, holding a candle in one hand, cupping its flame with the other, her face only a spot of pale white. Little lizards, their mother wrote, crawl in through the windows sometimes. I throw lit matches at them, hoping they’ll leave the way they came in, but they never do. The sisters, though, charm the lizards into a jar and take them out to release them back into the bushes beneath the windows where they live. In the letter, their mother told of her failed engagement and her new job in a desert vineyard owned by nuns near the border of Arizona. Their mother was still a rather young woman, having had Mabel much too early in her life. Mabel’s mother had been only fifteen, her father only eighteen, a couple of brats who thought they were in love for a few minutes. Mabel thought they’d been foolish to try to make a go of it; she would have had an abortion, plain and simple.

Lily held out her hand for the milagro—a tiny iron prayer piece. Their mother had often enclosed milagros through the years, the pieces shaped like body parts, little legs and arms and hands. A heart, a pair of lungs, an eye. When you have pain, Mabel’s mother had once written, in your tooth, or your arm, or wherever, you leave the milagro at a site of prayer. Lily never left the milagros anywhere; she hoarded them, and she acted like they were meant only for her, something secret shared with her mother. Mabel knew there were no messages for Lily in these tiny pieces of metal, but she was jealous nonetheless. Lily, with her distance and sly half smile and her way of not meeting your eyes, could take anything in hand and grant it mystery. As a little girl, Lily had tormented Mabel by plucking the most meaningless of junk from the antique shop—a bunch of half-broken glass grapes, an ugly, naked porcelain doll, its head a mange of rat-nest human hair—and turning it desirable, making Mabel curse herself for not first recognizing the beauty of the poor, neglected things. Even just a few weeks before, Lily had laid claim to a dilapidated school bus without seats or tires that was parked in the back. Their grandmother had used it as storage, and Lily emptied it of its junk in order to convert it into a private room for the summer. She still kept all her things in her upstairs room, still had to come in to use the bathroom, and still spent most of her early evening hours in the shop next to the window air conditioner, but nights she slept in the bus on a thin mattress draped with mosquito net. Lily called it her apartment, and she had even painted its inner and outer walls pink.

Lily put the milagro in her mouth and knocked it around with her tongue. She looked through all the summery dresses on the rack in the corner, the wire hangers shrieking on the metal rod, and picked out a sleeveless dress with a cherry print. The dress reminded Mabel of the one Marilyn Monroe wore in The Misfits. Lily took off her jeans, then stepped into the dress that fit tight and wouldn’t zip. But how pretty she looks, Mabel thought. Lily wasn’t all that fat anymore, but she wasn’t thin either, and what fat she had she carried well. Many men liked Lily for her head of curls and her old-style horn-rimmed glasses. Mabel picked up a pliers from a toolbox and went to Lily to fix the stuck zipper.

“How’s Jordan able to buy a car, anyway?” Mabel said. “His dad fired him last week.” Jordan’s father was the barber in Bonnevilla, and Jordan had done nails, buffing and inching back cuticles and gluing on tiny fancies, at a table in the back of the barbershop. Now Jordan only worked a few nights a week, playing his guitar for tips at the steakhouse in town.

“You’d know just as well as I would,” Lily said, pushing aside a collection of scarves to see into a full-length mirror. “Considering you and him have been so chummy lately.”

“What do you mean?” Mabel asked.

“You talk to him a lot when I’m not around. I mean, when he comes here, and I’m not here, I know you two talk to each other.”

“What are you trying to say, Lily?” Mabel asked, coaxing. She felt a blush hot in her cheeks and throat, anticipating a scuffle. She didn’t like arguing. Dispute and confrontation made her throat swell shut and her eyes run. But she felt so much closer to Lily when Lily was provoked. Mabel and Lily were just orphans, really, like Orphans of the Storm. In the shop was a box of glass slides for projecting on the screen of movie theaters. Though Mabel had seen only a few of the silent movies featured on these coming-attractions slides, she’d often cast the pictures onto the wall with a flashlight, imagining the stories behind the strange titles: The Sibyl’s Handmaiden; Chinatown Wastrels; The Yellow Piano; The Phantom Limbs of Captain Moore. The satellite dish in the backyard piped in some old-movie channels that Mabel watched religiously. She most longed to see all the movies of the Gish sisters. She loved the pictures of them holding hands or of them both sweetly gazing upon a common object, their peaked cheeks pressed together, their rouged, puckered lips tiny like black pansies. Why must Lily be so distant? Mabel wondered. Why couldn’t we be sisters famous for our devotion?

As Lily spoke, she tied up her curls in a ponytail with a souvenir scarf of the Niagara Falls depicting honeymooners going over in barrels. “What am I trying to say?” Lily said. “Well, Mabel, I’m trying to say that when I’m not here, you and Jordan talk. That’s what I’m trying to say, and I think that’s pretty much exactly what I fucking said. What I said is what I’m trying to say. The fucking end. I think a better question would be, What the fuck are you trying to say?”

“You know exactly what I’m trying to say,” Mabel said, though not sure herself. She pinched the pliers onto the head of the zipper and gently closed Lily’s dress, careful not to catch Lily’s soft pink skin in the ragged teeth.

“I don’t have the first mother-fucking clue what you’re trying to say to me,” Lily said. Before Mabel could speak again, Lily continued. “Is what you’re trying to say to me that I’m accusing you of trying to steal Jordan away?”

“Yes,” Mabel said, looking at Lily’s reflection in the mirror. “Yes. That’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it? Why can’t you ever just say what’s in your head? What are you so afraid’s going to happen?”

“Look,” Lily said, “you may feel guilty . . . you may have a guilty conscience about the time you spend alone with Jordan, or the feelings you may have for Jordan, but that’s your own thing. I’m not accusing you of anything.”

There are photographs of us, Mabel thought, evidence of two sorrowful and frightened sisters, and there are notes we wrote to each other. Complete and utter orphans, she thought. “Why don’t you ever talk to me about things?” Mabel said softly, fussing with the back of Lily’s dress, smoothing out a wrinkle. She was so worn out by her own complaint. Lily’s absence was an old absence.

“I talk to you,” Lily said, walking to the stairs. Her voice built as she went up to her room. “I talk to you all the time. Don’t you ever listen?” This was Lily’s way of turning everything around, Mabel knew, her way of trying to come across as the one sorely misunderstood.

Mabel thought of a retort, and she ran over to stand at the bottom of the stairs. “Who are you trying to convince, Lily?” she called up. “There’s no one here but us.” Think of us old, she would have said if Lily hadn’t slammed the door. Think of you in your wheelchair and me with a rat on a platter, me all Bette Davis late-career screech.

Mabel picked up a dusty perfume bottle and pinched at the bulb of the atomizer, misting her throat with a fragrance that somehow suggested flappers and Gatsby. The thing was, Mabel hadn’t spoken much to Jordan lately or to Lily. She’d been spending most of her hours driving up and down the gravel roads across the state looking for abandoned farmhouses to pillage. Mabel had been running the secondhand store on her own since the day her grandmother packed one shallow suitcase and booked a flight to Orlando, Florida, only a few months before. Her grandmother’s sister lived there in a condo in a retirement complex near a beach, along a street called Seashell Circle. “Now that Lily’s out of school,” her grandmother announced the night of Lily’s graduation in June, “you girls can look after yourselves.” Though Mabel and Lily were sad to see her go, they were mostly shocked to see her emerge from her room at all, let alone smiling and wearing a brand-new red dress. She also wore a Raquel Welch wig she’d ordered from an ad in a tabloid sometime before but never removed from its box. It was as if the undertaker had crept in with brush and makeup palette to make her grandmother look exactly as she had looked in life. For a long time, Mabel’s grandmother had been nothing more than a squeak of the floorboards and a thin stick of light beneath her shut bedroom door.

So Mabel took to the roads and salvaged anything she could from the old places, finding something to steal from even the emptiest of ruins—steam-heat radiators, cement gargoyles, the drawer pulls off built-in wardrobes, antique keys left in old locks. As the banks foreclosed on the area farms, rich people from town, the bankers and lawyers, bought the land for their dream houses and a few horses and maybe a Zen garden of fountains and imported rock. These people liked to fill their new luxury homes with artifacts of old farmhouses. They haunted the junk shop for doors of ornate woodwork or squares of stamped tin or ball-and-claw foot tubs.

Mabel loved her solitary drives across the counties, though all she had was a beaten-down Jimmy that frequently clunked to a complete stop on a back road. Deep in the country there wasn’t a junction every mile, and the highways, though marked on a map, were often nothing more than weed-choked paths of broken pavement that dead-ended no place special. In the daytime, Mabel didn’t mind the search for help. She’d jump a fence and cross a feedlot to drink from the pipe of a windmill. She’d watch the hawks circle then land in the trees planted for windbreaks at the edges of the fields. She’d eventually scare up a farmer who’d probably make fun of her lack of mechanical know-how, but the mocking was usually playful and flirty and Mabel enjoyed it. The fact was, Mabel had taken a few courses in mechanics from a community college, but she liked getting lost and needing help. She liked kicking up new people from a landscape so forsaken.

With Lily in her bedroom, Mabel returned to the fainting sofa. “Eat me,” Mabel mumbled, to Lily maybe or to no one in particular. “Bite me.” You’re much too easygoing, Mabel remembered her mother telling her, back when Mabel’s father was still alive. People will stomp all over you, if you’re not careful. What kind of a thing was that to tell an eight-year-old girl, Mabel now wondered. “Kiss my rosy red,” she said. She picked up a fedora from a hat stand, spanked off its dust, and put it on. Size 7. She felt a static electricity working out from the brim of the hat, lifting strands of hair from her skin. She used to think that snap of shock was her father having become some short-wired ghost, giving her a little smooch. Sometimes Mabel saw her father’s reflection in the corners of glass or caught scent of the clove gum he constantly chewed, and she knew he remained watchful and curious about the ways of her life. Mabel wasn’t at all religious, but it only made sense that her father kept near. His blood was still inside of her, after all.

Jordan drove up just as all the old clocks for sale on the wall began their fractured chiming. “Anybody got the time?” Jordan said, smirking and stepping in. The shop’s light glinted on the key he wore on a shoestring around his neck. Mabel and Lily first met Jordan a year or so before when he’d come out to sell some torn-up Louis L’Amours. Mabel bought everything he brought out over the months. She paid much too much for the metal ribs of an old barrel and the red tailfin of a wrecked ’57 Chevy. Jordan’s teeth were already yellow and broken from too much nicotine and sugar, so he had a shy, tight-lipped smile Mabel and Lily both fell for.

He leaned over the back of the sofa and Mabel touched at the key swinging from the end of its string. “What’s that key to, anyway?” Mabel said.

“Some lock somewhere,” Jordan said, shrugging. “But I got this deal I’ve got to strike up with you. Think you’ll buy this?” He held out a silver egg-shaped container, and he twisted off its top to show her the green stains inside. He said, “In this, you’d cure your betel nuts in lime.”

“I don’t know,” Mabel said, suddenly tired of contemplating the price of junk.

Jordan set the betel-nut thing next to Mabel on the sofa, and he shouted out for Lily. He took a swig from a little bottle of Vicks Formula 44 he carried in his pants pocket. “Oh, Lily,” he sung out.

He loved Lily very much, Mabel knew, but Lily was devoted to no one in her life. She was only moved by the attention of strangers, particularly strange men in their late twenties, men who maybe had a divorce already, or at least some well-earned disillusion. Lily worked nights at the steak-house and days at the counter of a bakery in Bonnevilla. The bakery was across the street from a Texaco station and down the street from the police station and the library. Mechanics and cops and mustached librarians in tweed would come in to buy stale pastries at half price and to tease her about the coffee as black and nasty as bilgewater.

It did seem to Mabel, as she watched Lily come down the stairs, that Lily wore their father’s suicide almost seductively. Maybe the men sitting alone in the bakery, leaning in toward her as she poured her awful coffee, would smell her perfume, a perfume as uncomplicated, as unoriginal as White Shoulders, and remember some other’s throat, some other’s wrist. They’d notice her looking vaguely wrecked—her lipstick smeared a little or an earring gone or a button gone from her blouse—and these men would love her for a sadness they hadn’t caused.

Lily walked slowly down the stairs having put on a pair of white pumps too long in the toe and too high in the heel. Her dress was unzipped again, and she turned her back to Jordan without a hello. “Do me up, hon,” she said, and Jordan obliged, moving in close behind her, putting his lips to the skin of her shoulder as he zipped her dress. He noticed an insect on her neck, and he blew it away before kissing her there. The insect landed on the back of Mabel’s hand. It was a strange black ant with wine-colored wings that looked like ornate paper-cuttings. Mabel suspected these odd bugs, these winged ants and white bees she’d been noticing lately, were a result of the new genetically altered crops farmers were resorting to.

Lily winked at Mabel as Jordan kissed her, and she stretched her neck for more of Jordan’s affection. “I’m sorry we fought, Mabel,” Lily said, nearly whispering. “You’re welcome to hate me for the rest of the night, just don’t hate me forever.” Mabel often daydreamed of hating Lily forever. She wished she could sustain her anger the way Lily did, the way Lily might spend days not speaking because of some slight, shut up in her room with old Vogues and a handkerchief wrapped around her hot head as if she were convalescing. Lily had convinced herself that her pain was original, unique, unlike the pain endured by anyone anywhere in the history of time. Over the years, Mabel had tried to teach her otherwise by collecting short articles depicting worse tragedies from the back pages of the newspaper. She’d leave these clippings on Lily’s pillow, stories like the one about the girl who pushed her twin down an old well or the one about a woman who slowly poisoned her sister by stirring iron filings into her nightly cup of chamomile.

Lily unrolled the short sleeve of Jordan’s shirt to get at the pack there. “This is candy,” Lily said.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’m trying to quit smoking. But look here,” and he took one of the bubble gum cigarettes from the pack and held it to his lips. He blew into it and a dusting of fine, powdery sugar made a cloud. “Just like smoke,” he said.

“Where’s the car?” Lily said, waving her hand in the air, refusing the bubble gum. Jordan took Lily’s wrist, then Mabel’s, and led them out to the front porch. Beneath the lamp that lit the gravel drive sat the two-door Packard faded away to a pale gray. Rust spots like gunshot riddled the side of it. A dishtowel hung in place of the glass of one of the side windows.

“One of those ninety-nine-dollar paint jobs and she’ll be the prettiest girl on the block,” Jordan said. Mabel imagined riding in the back of the car to the river on a muggy afternoon, wearing a swimsuit with a beach towel wrapped around her waist. Jordan would be in a pair of cutoff jeans and a tropical shirt all unbuttoned, Lily beside him painting her toenails with her foot up and pressed against the dashboard. They’d listen to the old records her father had taped—Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello and The Clash.

Jordan took a box from the backseat of the car. “This woman in town had meant to open up a Starkweather museum. She put a new engine in the car and everything, so people could go for joy rides in it. But she ran out of money.” He took from the box the other artifacts he’d bought from the woman: a doll Caril Ann had made from twisting up a Kleenex, and a sign Caril had put up on the door of her house where she and Charlie holed up for six days after he killed her family. The sign read: STAY AWAY EVERY BODY IS SICK WITH THE FLU.

“I’m not buying any of this from you,” Mabel said. “It’s borderline perverted. Not to mention hexed.” But Lily, with reverence, lifted the impossibly fragile Kleenex doll from the box and held it in her palm. She touched a fingertip to its bald head. Lily and Jordan once took a bus to Lincoln to visit Starkweather’s grave at the Wyuka Cemetery and to attempt a seance.

“None of this stuff is for sale, anyway,” Jordan said. “I robbed that woman blind and this is all going to only appreciate in value.” Jordan opened the doors for Lily and Mabel. Mabel slipped into the backseat and sat back. The vinyl was torn, the cushions lumpy, and she wondered if there might be something grisly sewn into the seat—the silent remains of something unspeakable. Jordan didn’t start the car yet, savoring it, holding the steering wheel, steering a little, fiddling with the radio knob and pushing in the cigarette lighter. The car smelled of must and mice. A broken spring in the seat poked at the back of Mabel’s leg. It seemed to Mabel that, in such a car, one would be inspired by the spirit of renegade youth and not be scared of anything. But the only thing that affected Mabel was the view out the window. The sun was setting at the edge of the desolation, casting its sharp glow across the miles of nothingness to be traveled before reaching a good place.

Mabel longed for the circle of lights of the Ferris wheel at the fairgrounds on the edge of town. The Hamilton County fair had just ended after a long weekend; as a little girl, Mabel had sat on the roof of the porch to watch the lights of the fair spin and flash, the carnival like a ghost city, a mid-western Brigadoon, rising from the mist once a year. On still nights she could hear the smash of the demolition derby or even the bleat of sheep penned and judged. Even years later, walking alongside the booths and tents and trucks of the carnival, the air thick with humidity and the smell of cotton candy and candied apples, Mabel wouldn’t have been surprised to see her father holding Lily up to pick a rubber duck from a tub of running water. On the bottom of the duck would be the number of Lily’s prize, a plastic shark’s tooth on the end of a necklace that Lily would give to her mother to wear. When her parents fussed over Lily, when Lily was small, was when Mabel most felt part of a family, when Lily’s crying and laughing, napping and waking, were of great amusement and concern. Mabel would never forget sitting on her mother’s lap in the old apartment one Sunday, both of them rapt and silent watching Lily sleep naked but for a diaper against her sleeping father’s naked chest. Her father lay back on the sofa, Lily in his arms, the funnies spread out on the floor beside them. The Silly Putty they’d been playing with still held the stretched-out image of Dick Tracy’s daughter-in-law Moonbeam. “Aren’t we lucky?” Mabel’s mother whispered in her ear.

At the fair just the night before, Jordan, even three sheets to the wind, had won Lily one of those square, painted mirrors, by knocking over milk bottles with a wrecked baseball, its stitching in pieces. On the mirror was a retro cartoon of R. Crumb’s bald-headed Keep On Truckin’ high-steppers. But Jordan let Mabel have the mirror when Lily disappeared with a gangly, nothing-to-lose carny who felt her up beneath the bleachers of the rodeo. Lily confessed in the middle of the night, in the middle of the midway noisy with heavy-metal music blaring from the Wild Octopus and the Screaming Mimi, and Jordan forgave her because she was in tears—the carny had stolen her ruby earrings by expertly nibbling on her lobes.

“There’s a State Highway 666,” Jordan said, the car still and silent, “goes south down Arizona. Can you imagine? Driving Starkweather’s car down Highway 666?”

The sleeves of Jordan’s shirt were too short for his long arms. Lily traced her finger along the scar across Jordan’s right wrist. “When you did this,” she said to Jordan, “did you leave some kind of note?” Lily and I wonder about so many of the same things, Mabel thought, pleased.

In all the months Mabel and Lily had known Jordan, they’d not spoken of his most obvious relation to their father. But the similarity wasn’t all that obvious. After all, she thought, their father had succeeded at suicide and Jordan had failed—two very, very different situations.

Mabel listened closely to Jordan’s hindered breathing, the old-man’s rattle of congestion in his young-man’s chest. He was only a boy, just barely nineteen, yet afflicted with a litany of minor ailments and an addiction to over-the-counter remedies. He licked at those cold-medicine lollipops for kids even when he had no sniffle; he constantly popped Advil, sucking the sweet, candy-like coating off each tablet. As he took another hit off his Primatene Mist, Mabel wondered how Lily could just sit there resisting holding his stuffed-up head to her bosom to smooth down his rooster tail and whisper love and comfort.

Jordan recited from his suicide note. “Think this not,” he mumbled, “a tragedy of great proportion. Think it only the delicate misstep of someone’s dying life.”

“Hmmmm,” Lily hummed, her voice a sexy wink. “You’re a poet, sweetie.” But Mabel leaned back disappointed. She’d hoped for a letter violent with accusation and spite. These were not the true words of a young man longing for death, and Mabel knew something of fake suicide notes. Before her mother left for Mexico, she took Mabel and Lily aside. “Girls,” she’d said, for Mabel and Lily were just very small girls then, Mabel only about ten years old, “I have something for you.” She took a piece of paper from her pocket and unfolded it. Mabel recognized her mother’s stationery—powder blue with gray kittens next to Fiona B. Rollow at the top of the page—and her mother’s handwriting, all petite curlicue and extra flourish. But her mother said, “Your father left this note behind. To whom it may concern,” she read aloud, “Please, no one take responsibility for my pain . . . it is my own fault, my own failing. My daughters, please don’t blame your mother for my death, and don’t blame your mother if she can’t take care of you on her own. It would be much too hard for her, as it would be for anyone. I realize what I am about to do is so unfair. But I dug a hole for myself, and I can’t get out of it. Sincerely, Eddy Rollow.”

Mabel had wanted to believe those were her father’s words, but it had been impossible. My daughters? as it would be for anyone? I dug a hole? It had depressed Mabel even then that her mother wouldn’t have known better, wouldn’t have known that Mabel and Lily loved their father so much because he was not a man who would write with such formality and stiffness. If Eddy Rollow had left a suicide note, Mabel thought, it would have been in the margins of a favorite book. Or he would have written it on the wall of the kitchenette of the old apartment, his script flowing around the pomegranates and grapes and almonds in the wallpaper’s print. Or, more likely, he would have written his words in the dissolving steam of the bathroom mirror.

Now the note, which Mabel kept in a fire-safe box, was taking on the qualities of age and of damage from the constant opening and closing. Each time Mabel took the note out to read it again, its folds crumbled and tore a bit more, and more of the words, in pencil, had begun to fade away into the powder blue. Always before, Mabel had hated the letter, this evidence of her mother’s deception, but she’d grown to need it. As its words dissolved and the paper fell apart, as it slowly ceased to exist, it became something true. This lie became an honest portrait of Mabel’s mother and her confusion.

If Mabel had been in the front seat with Jordan, she would have taken his hand and kissed his scar, then held his hand to her cheek. She and Lily knew none of the details of their father’s suicide, except that it involved a gun. They didn’t know if he’d put it in his mouth or in his ear, didn’t know if it had taken apart his head or had left a simple clean hole. Mabel had even fantasized that he’d merely meant to shoot himself in the foot, to injure himself to get disability. He’d often complained of his job as a foreman at a company that manufactured trailer homes. Mabel had loved how his skin smelled of the sawdust from freshly cut wood, and she’d sit on his lap and nuzzle her nose in his neck as he read from the funnies page at night. He particularly enjoyed Andy Capp, so much so that he even ate a bag of Andy Capp—brand Hot Fries every day from the lunchroom vending machine.

Mabel touched at the back of Jordan’s neck; his skin was hot, almost feverish, and damp with sweat. “Drive us someplace,” she said, looking toward the little yellow lights of Bonnevilla. Mabel wished Jordan would drive them quickly away, fast enough for them to move ahead in time, for her to look back on the whole of her life and learn something about who she would become. Would she have any babies, and would she be the type of mother to abandon them, or would she be the type of mother to steal them away and vanish without a trace? Actually, she couldn’t see herself with children at all—she imagined something of a monastic life for herself, imagined a life of stomped grapes and kept bees and scratchy robes with belts of rope.