My Tiki Girl (11 page)

Jonah touches one of the stick people hanging over his head.

“This is powerful magic,” he says.

“Good or bad?” asks Dahlia.

“Good. Definitely good. A benevolent wizard is at work here.”

Benevolent,
he says. Jonah’s vocabulary surprises me sometimes. The way he gets such big words out of his small mouth, sounding out each syllable carefully. It’s like he’s got a dictionary in his head—one of those big fat dictionaries at the library that you can hardly lift.

In the corner, there is a sleeping bag rolled up. Jonah unrolls it slowly like there might be a snake inside guarding its master’s nest. The boy wizard slides his hand gently into the top of the bag, gropes around for a moment, then pulls out a bundle. There’s a flashlight, and a crude hammer made from a rock lashed with a bootlace to the top of a Y-shaped maple branch. It’s more like a tomahawk than a hammer, really.

The last thing Jonah pulls out is a book. It’s an old brown hardcover, the spine broken from being opened so many times. Jonah thumbs it open eagerly, like he thinks it might contain spells and magic recipes. What it really turns out to be is a medical textbook—a guide to human anatomy. It’s full of drawings of organs, the circulatory system, lymph nodes, colored pictures that label the valves of the heart. Tucked among its pages are more bits of knotted string like they’re marking special places. Like the liver is an especially important organ, and the network of occipital nerves hold the secret to the very meaning of life. It kind of creeps me out, seeing our insides laid out and diagrammed, like we’re nothing but complicated pieces of meat.

A photo falls out from between the pages—a black-and-white photo of rows of women in crisp white nurse’s uniforms standing in front of a brick building. None of the women are smiling. Studying medicine is serious business; you can see it in their faces. These women have had their hands inside deep wounds, they’ve reached into cadavers and touched cold hearts. They will never be the same.

Also tucked into the pages are grungy, crumpled bills—ones, tens, and fives. Lots of them. There must be over two hundred bucks stuck between the pages. Jonah replaces the treasures, closes the book slowly, making sure nothing falls out.

There is a row of people by the sleeping bag—a man, woman, boy, and girl—with stick arms and legs, bottle cap heads, clothes made from old candy wrappers. There is even a dog with them—he’s made from sticks wrapped round and round with brown string.

A family of dolls, I think, knowing Leah will be pleased when we tell her this part of the story. I pick up one of the dolls—the girl; her dress is made from Milky Way wrappers tied at the waist with a belt of green thread. Her head is a flattened Coke bottle cap with holes punched through it. Tied into the holes are small bits of red yarn for hair. Dahlia and Jonah just can’t seem to stop smiling, and as I hold the stick girl in my hand, study the careful way she was put together, made from little bits of nothing, I realize I’m grinning, too.

“We should make sure to put things back exactly the way we found them,” Jonah says as he tucks the book back into the sleeping bag. “We don’t want to spook the String Man.”

He says it like the String Man is some skittish animal—half wild, half tame. I put the doll back down where I found her, between her mother and brother.

Jonah says it’s time to go, we’ve been here long enough, and Dahlia and I know better than to argue. We leave the cave slowly, reluctantly, one at a time. Jonah is last, and he dusts away our footprints as we go.

“Do you think he really
lives
there?” I ask as we are climbing back down the hill, moving around the massive hunks of rock to get back down to the stream.

“Hard to say,” answers Dahlia as she leans against a boulder taller than she is. “It seems like more of a hideout than a home.”

“But he sleeps there, at least sometimes,” adds Jonah.

“I wonder what he eats, if he really does live out here in the woods,” Dahlia muses.

“There’s lots of food around if you know how to find it,” explains Jonah. “Berries, roots, the stuff Indians lived on before white people came.”

“Speaking of Indians, did you get a load of that tomahawk?” Dahlia asks. “I guess he wants to be ready in case any uninvited guests show up.”

“He probably just uses it as a tool,” guesses Jonah, eager to defend the String Man.

“A knife is a tool, and look what it did to Dead Aunt Mary.” Dahlia raises her eyebrows knowingly, and suddenly, we’re all talking about Halloween again; we’re talking this ninety-mile-an-hour kind of talk, our sentences rolling into each other’s as we guess how much candy we’ll get, what neighborhoods Leah will take us to. Dahlia tells us the story of Dead Aunt Mary again, giving more details this time about the way her sister plunged the huge butcher knife into Mary’s chest, how she hit major arteries, making the blood come out in buckets.

We talk about what Leah’s costume might be. Jonah thinks she’ll go as her doll self, Mother Mary, but Dahlia says that one’s too obvious, and Jonah looks a little hurt, like maybe being a wizard each year is too obvious also.

Once in a while, as we walk the long way back to their apartment, we wonder out loud about the String Man. We even guess that maybe he’s not a him but a her. Maybe she’s one of the nurses in the photo. A nurse gone crazy who lives in the woods eating wild greens and chipmunks. Dahlia’s eyes light up as she spins the story of how the nurse got to be so crazy and describes how she walks the forests at night now in her dirty white uniform, looking for victims for surgery.

“She carries a scalpel with her wherever she goes. She removes body parts from passing strangers. She drugs them, puts a rag soaked in ether over their mouths, then takes whatever she’s hungry for: a spleen, pinkie, eyeballs. The surgery is brief but bloody, and the victims always live but have to go through the rest of their lives with parts missing. The parts the nurse gobbled down.”

Jonah and I shudder. It’s just starting to get dark, and we’re both scanning the sides of the railroad tracks for a figure in white. Dahlia is describing what the nurse looks like—her white dress covered in blood, nails dirty, hair a mess of tangles with twigs woven in.

“Now
that
,” announces Dahlia, pleased with herself, “is a great idea for next year’s Halloween costume.”

11

“I think the
String Man is some homeless railroad tramp,” Dahlia says. We’re back at the apartment now, filling Leah in on the details of our adventure. Jonah, Dahlia, and I are sitting on the couch with Leah, who doesn’t feel well at all. She’s wearing her orange robe with fake fur around the cuffs and neckline. It’s worn through in places and full of small cigarette burns. Her hair is dirty, the purple sleeping mask she wears pushed up like a headband, making her bleached hair stick out at funny angles. She hasn’t showered for a couple days, has barely left the bedroom where she lies, smoking, in her robe, listening to call-in shows on her crackly AM radio. She doesn’t play music when she’s like this, and the dolls sit quiet and motionless on her dresser.

When Leah doesn’t feel well, she believes she is under psychic attack. Someone, or something, is out to get her. Jonah makes rings of salt around her bed. He casts spells while she sleeps.

Sometimes, the psychic attack gets so bad, she doesn’t leave her bed at all. Once, it lasted for three weeks, and Dahlia had to call Aunt Elsbeth, who drove all the way from New York to bring them food and get Leah back on her medicine.

“I think you should stay away from that cave,” says Leah, and with this, she’s off to bed again, the end of her orange robe trailing sadly behind her. Jonah follows, leather pouch of salt in hand.

Dahlia and I sit together on the couch, listening to Leah as she adjusts her radio and Jonah as he tells her he’s going to banish all evil from the room. Dahlia closes her eyes and leans her head back against the worn-out fabric of the couch.

“Do you ever just wish things were different?” she asks.

“Different how?”

“I dunno. Easier. Normal, I guess. Do you ever wish things were just a little more freaking normal?” Dahlia asks, then she jumps up and heads into the kitchen before I have a chance to answer.

“Yes,” I say even though the only one who can hear me is myself. “All the time.”

I hear her open the fridge and rummage around. I know there’s not much in there—I saw when I looked for a soda earlier. Leah’s been too sick to go out and it’s the end of the month, so all the money’s gone. Dahlia says they’ll get another check and food stamps in a few days.

“Stay for supper, LaSamba,” Dahlia calls out, her head still in the refrigerator, her voice sounding like she’s calling to me from someplace far away—the bottom of a well maybe. “We can finish our rocks after.”

I call my father to say I’m eating at the Wainwrights’. He hesitates before responding, like he feels a little let down. Like maybe he was planning something special for dinner.

“More of Mrs. Wainwright’s French cooking, huh?” he asks.

“Mmm-hmm,” I say, thinking how funny it is to hear Leah referred to as Mrs. Wainwright.

“Are you sure you’re not overstaying your welcome there, Maggie?” he asks, and it’s clear that he just doesn’t get it—how much more I feel a part of things here than at home.

“They really want me to stay,” I tell him. “And Dahlia and I have to finish up our project for Earth Science. It’s due tomorrow.”

There’s a long pause. “Be home by nine, Mags,” he says.

“Will do.”

I don’t ask him about the view from his office. I don’t think of it until I’m off the phone.

“Maybe the String Man is one of the losers who hangs out in the clearing,” Dahlia starts in without prelude when I join her in the kitchen. “Did you see the girls in that magazine they had? What hornballs!”

“Yeah, pretty sick,” I say, not looking her in the eye.

Dahlia takes a little ground beef from a package in the fridge and puts it in a bowl. She adds the last two eggs, bread crumbs, oatmeal, a can of Spam, a whole bunch of ketchup, and an ancient-looking package of onion soup mix. Then she gets a can of chickpeas down from the cupboard, mashes them up and throws them in, too. I watch as she mixes the mess up with her hands.

I try to imagine what Dahlia will be in ten years. A rock star. A famous poet. She’ll be something great. This much I know. She’ll outshine us all. She’s meant for better things than making end-of-the-month meat loaf.

“What are you thinking?” she asks. “You look like a worried clown.”

I’m thinking that I love you.

“Nothing. I’m not thinking about anything at all.”

She puts the meat loaf in the oven and gets out a nearly empty bag of freezer-burned French fries.

“Don’t worry so much, LaSamba,” she says, touching my cheek, making me nearly jump right out of my skin. “You’ll get an ulcer or something.”

Jonah won’t eat his meat loaf. He nibbles at the shoestring fries (there were only enough for his plate) and drinks a glass of powdered milk that Dahlia mixed up in a pitcher.

“Don’t like meat loaf anymore, champ?” Dahlia asks.

“I can’t eat it.”

“No problemo. I thought it was your favorite.”

“Not today. Not anymore. I got a message that if something was once alive, had a heart and blood, I shouldn’t eat it.” He doesn’t look up when he speaks, just looks down at his plate like he’s counting the salt crystals on his fries.

“A message from who?” Dahlia asks, staring at her brother with narrowed eyes.

“A spirit guide. It’s been talking to me all afternoon.”

Dahlia is quiet for a minute. She chews on her meat loaf, still looking at Jonah.

“Well, shit,” she finally says after swallowing, “I guess we’ll have to feed you tofu.”

Jonah smiles at this.

“Toad food would be fine, I think,” he answers.

“A fit meal for a wizard,” Dahlia declares, tousling his hair with her hand.

Sometimes, the things Dahlia does make me want to cry. Right now, it’s the way she loves Jonah so completely, the expression on her face when she runs her hand through his hair. It’s an expression that says,
I would do anything to keep you from harm.
Unconditional. I guess that’s what it is. Her brother can say a spirit guide talked to him, can insist trolls are out to get him, and Dahlia listens, believes what he says, loves him all the more for it.

Dahlia clears the table, then fixes a tray of food to bring Leah. She goes in to Leah’s room alone. When Leah is having a day of psychic attack, it’s best not to overwhelm her.

Dahlia stays in the room for what seems like a long time. I wash the dishes, then go out to sit on the couch. Jonah runs his bath. For him, bath preparations are lengthy and intricate. He has a huge collection of toys he brings with him: plastic boats, frogs, swans, sharks, octopuses, even a windup scuba diver. He’s probably too old to take baths with all those toys, but no one seems to care, least of all him.

I watch him bring the pouch of salt in along with his magic wand. He must cast spells in the tub. Water spells where he asks for rain or makes it so no one he knows will ever go thirsty. Maybe he casts a spell over his plastic animals and brings them to life. He’s got to be doing something for all that time in there—Jonah can spend two hours in the tub easily. When he gets out, he’s cold and his skin is pruny and white.