Stunt (10 page)

‘No Eugenia,' says Mink.

‘No Eugenia,' echoes Immaculata.

‘None.' I round them up. They look at me as if I have nipped their ankles and taken square centimetres of their skin.

Mink has never seen the flying monk. She does not know his significance. Every human being has his own Morse code. Yours was particularly dense. She studied you as one might read the clavicle of a bull, trying to divine messages from fractures and patterns. But to no avail. She did not live in your age. She did not have that skill. I did. I would know.

I read the note once, roll it between my fingers, a missile, leave the studio and place it on the kitchen table, careful, it may go off. Five fish are fanned out there. Fried in butter. The pan is still on the stove. I touch it. A blister forms on my fingertip. I kick up my chin, feel my hair down my back, brambles, and shake my head, the horse before the race.

Your bicycle.
    I run to the window.
    Your bicycle.
    Gone.

The apple tree has been plucked bare. I run to your bedroom, spare change gone, matches too. Did you kiss me while I slept? I touch my mouth. Yes. I look in the bathroom: toilet seat left up. Open the top drawer of your dresser: my baby hair is gone, that black tuft between the tie clips, single socks, handkerchiefs,
leather boxes, pencils, French cigarettes and a photograph of you in your suit, in a rooming house, canvases lined up against the wall, attentive, waiting, and you, pretending to sword-fight them with a brush, cigarette dancing in your mouth, everything dancing for you, the world an instant tango.
Huzzah,
I hear your voice,
huzzah.
I run faster. The same route: the kitchen, the frying pan, the window, the bedroom, my mouth, the bathroom, the dresser, the kitchen, the frying pan, the window, the bedroom, my mouth, the bathroom, the dresser, the kitchen, the frying pan, the window, the bedroom, my mouth, your dresser – until a new part of me is lanced into being, red splotches burst on my neck making meteors of my skin, I beat them back. A brush fire. To put it out, you have to axe the roots.

It smells like butter and crematorium. It smells like melted dolls.

Immaculata whistles in her sleep. If she sleeps. Of this, I have never been sure. She does not whistle songs, but whistles as though she is calling for something, for someone. Probably the dead. So marooned is she on the other side of the River Styx. The summoner. I crash mercifully against the rocks. I am whistled awake.

With her call, the sun rises, swelling the room and wresting my eyes open. They are hard-boiled eggs. I have not really slept for a year, with you always shaking me out of it, your fresh tobacco breath,
secret. Secret,
I would repeat, touching my heart or my throat, fingers a cuff.

‘Good morning, Eugenia.'

‘Good morning.'

Immaculata sits beside me, upright, pew posture. She watched me through the night, the bitten edges of my sleep, the hum of my breath, my stiff body an ache, having broken through the quiet of our world, taking floorboards, stained carpets and set tables with me, a wig, false teeth and a note duct-taped to a door. A skydiver falling fast. If I asked Immaculata, she would tell me what I dreamed about. But I don't. I already know. In four days, I have become a person with only one dream.

We get up, look for Mink, knowing that she is gone, the world her pageant. Still, there is effort in our search. We scream her name loudly; our house is a black ocean and she is adrift within it. We look in closets. In the basement. We pull back curtains and covers. We open and close doors, the refrigerator. We check underneath beds – every moment, a jack-in-the-box. She took nothing with her save the fur coat, the pink toque and the car.

‘She didn't leave a note,' says Immaculata, deflating.

‘I wonder if she has already forgotten our names.'

‘I wonder if she has already forgotten her name too.'

‘Maybe this is why she won't answer our screams.'

‘Maybe.'

‘Because she's forgotten who she is.'

‘Maybe she's still here somewhere and we're scaring her silly.'

‘Mink doesn't get scared.'

‘True.'

‘She wouldn't forget that.'

All the lights are off. We enter the bathroom, its surfaces still in a sweat from the night before. We flick on the overhead light; it twitches into brightness. We bend into the sink together and scrub our faces, and it is then that the mirror delivers the final evolutionary feat: in the night, we have doubled in age. We are eighteen. Instantly and thoroughly, eighteen. Our mouths are crowded with teeth, my black eyes and bruised neck healed. We lean into our reflections and trace our new faces, the old ones tucked inside them, Russian dolls. Our jaws are strong, our cheeks less full. Faint lines have formed, shading, around our eyes and our lips, our loose grip on childhood now gone. Were we asleep for nine years? We turn on the radio. No. It confirms that this is the fourth day, the fourth day since you disappeared. June
10, 1981.
The fourth day of Sheb Departed. The world remains the same. We are the ones changed.

We examine our shapes. With Immaculata's height came curves. She stands sideways to the mirror and then spins slowly, a figurine on a cake. ‘Whoa.' She is impressed. I am too. If I had a glass of something, I would spill it. She has breasts that bounce like she is riding in an apple cart, and a down bustle for a
bottom. It is as though the magi were here and they were erotic-minded, visiting her, their eastern star, with curves hidden in their bulky coats, bestowing them to those willing eyes in the hay. I am still flat from the side, a pencil drawing, contourless. The shape of a coffin. Sawed straight. Standard Eugenia. My magi, my heat lamp, a thousand miles gone.

We eat cake left over from the funeral. Nuts and cherries. It tastes smoky. Flo.

‘I bet they went in opposite directions,' Immaculata says gravely, a beginner detective, mouth white with icing sugar.

‘I bet you're right.'

‘I bet they don't intend to reunite.'

‘No.'

‘Their only true commonality was lovemaking.'

‘And, in turn, us.'

‘They packed hastily and badly, which reflects a lack of fore-thought, and which tells us that this was not a scheme long in the hatching, but rather the directionless instincts of lunatics suddenly freed from an asylum.'

‘Not that we were an asylum,' I remind her.

‘No. Not that we were an asylum. They loved us, Eugenia.'

‘If that's what that was.'

‘That's what that was.'

My jaw hurts. Immaculata grips it in one of her hands, which is now more like a paw, a paw that could catch salmon and break necks.

‘Though they have forsaken this love.' She softens. ‘And we
are not going to live in the hopes that this love, like them, will come back. If we do, we too will be barefoot and walking the streets without identification. We must agree to belong only to each other, to never speak their names, and in so doing, to do what they have done to us – to root them out from behind our eyes. Promise, Eugenia. Promise.'

‘No.'

‘Yes.'

‘No.'

‘Yes.'

‘No. I'm too old for that.'

We cover the funeral cake we cannot finish and put it back in the fridge, wash our dishes and leave by the front door, Immaculata tripping over her feet and hitting her head on the frame. I tuck the box of matches you gave to me into my pocket and I sling Marta's rope around my shoulder.

But first we spend a moment looking at Mink's wig. It is very fine. We stroke it. Its red is a finality. The velvet curtain. An ending. Precisely what you, even after Mink's toothbrush, will not give over. But this was Mink's way. As she was haunted by nothing, she does not haunt. Whereas you lurk here, your presence a gauze that has draped itself over everything. Our life, a cottage closed for the winter. Water turned off. White sheets on the furniture, shut eyes.

I read your note one last time. Is there something I missed? The letters are short and shaken. You pressed down so hard, bits of pencil fleck the page silver. You wrote it on a scrap of
newsprint. The birth and death notices. From the back of the sports section.
I love beginnings!
I lift it to my nose. It erupts. Unwashed man skin, old smoke, cat, wet wool, apple.

gone to save the world
sorry mink,
immaculata,
sorry
yours
sheb wooly ledoux
asshole

You did not write my name because you did not want to distract me with it. You wanted me to study the drawing. The drawing is what counts. The drawing is the clue. The flying monk is not St. Joseph of Cupertino as I had thought, but Finbar. I. I. Finbar Me the Three Handsome Funambulist and Colossal Menagerie. Finbar in his black tights and his leather shoes. Finbar who could not fall.

I hear the slam of our mailbox. Look out the window. The postman. He wears postman shorts. His legs are wishbones. His face is the face of a man who has just learned that there are no fairies.

‘Just a minute,' I say to Immaculata and I sprint to the door panther-fast. She cannot, with her new limbs, keep up. ‘Wait. Wait,' she pleads, collapsing in a lanky pile near the stairs.

It is a letter. Addressed to me. My first.
Ms. Eugenia Ledoux.
The handwriting, not yours.

I hear Immaculata come to her feet in her too-small white slippers and lumber along the hallway, using the walls for balance, the mariner battling smoke and fog. I stuff the letter into my suit
pocket just as she arrives beside me. In the doorway, she looks trapped, too exotic for this place.

‘What? What did you find? Did Mink leave a note after all?'

Almost telling her everything – the nights by the lake, my feats, the flying monk, Finbar in photographs flashing his white teeth like sticks of dynamite, the air picking him clean – I say, as tall as her new breasts now, ‘No. Nothing.' In that small utterance, that single word, I see for the first time how much I need, how much I love, a secret. And with it, I look up and I begin to memorize my sister's aging face.

‘Let's go.' The letter thumps in my pocket, a tantrum. Immaculata stalls. ‘Let's go.' I say it again, insistent, our house now taking on the sonority of a cave. I lean into my sister. Her hipbone points sharp like an arrow, north. And then, as you and Mink did before us, we leave. Only we leave together. And we, white dress and black suit, look newlywed.

The house next door is burned down. Its black frame stands naked and quivering, a thing shorn. No walls. No doors. There is a hole in the roof. Inside, embers sputter and hiss. If it rained, it would sound like a den of snakes. A spoon. A child's purple sweater. A television slurred across a table. The first-aid kit. This is all that is left. The rest is charred ruins. Coal sandcastles, black hoodoos still smoking. They slope and point, broken teeth, the twins' faces carved into every surface. It is now, in disaster, that God is an artist. There is a small crowd gathered beyond the yellow tape, taking photographs, the cuffs of their pants blackening with ash. They don't even speak to each other. Mink would have studied the misfortune too.

The twins decided,
against good judgment,
to make pastry for us in the middle of the night. Now they have to wear tight white nets to keep their skin on. When they heal, their faces will be pulled and uneven, smeared with egg whites left there by a cook, half-asleep, to glaze and congeal. Mr. and Mrs. Next Door
have had it.
So the twins have been sent to the suburbs to live with their grandmother who cannot tell them apart so she uses only one name for both of them. Eventually, they do too.

Their grandmother has a one-bedroom apartment, thirty-five storeys up, that looks over a highway and then onto a cemetery. By nighttime, she jokes about the cemetery. On her small balcony she has put a television and hung a flag so weather-ruined, the country is unreadable. There, she watches
her shows
in a housecoat, purse clutched to her chest. She falls asleep, head hanging down. Hair, cobwebs. When the twins wake her to carry her to her bed, their favourite activity, the housecoat slippery, the ankles
and wrists too, she pulls them close – soup, baby powder – and whispers, ‘When can I go?' ‘Never,' they whisper. ‘You have to stay here with me,' convincing her that there is only one of them and that she is seeing double.

While Mrs. Next Door walks the debris of their home with the strain of a woman trying not to break anything, we meet the twins' father in the driveway. His eyebrows and eyelashes are singed hay-yellow. He is wearing blue pyjamas. They are threadbare and need mending. His body hair pokes through them, thick as quills. Mr. Next Door coughs a bit, and then he asks, ‘What will become of the house?' It is the first time he has ever spoken to us. His voice is mellifluous, pure. It has never been used. If he wanted to read to me for an entire day, in the dark corner of a strange room with nothing else in it but a hobby horse, I would let him. ‘We don't know,' says Immaculata. ‘We haven't decided.'

Mr. Next Door motions for us to follow. We do. To his hatchback, a peeling dwarf beside him. He opens the trunk. Pop. And pulls out a black suitcase. He flicks it open, covertly, like it is a music box with a wind-up spinning girl. It is full of money. Neat stacks of it. So much, it must be fake.

‘Is it real?' I ask, recalling his photocopier scent, seeing him alone in a dank basement, making money, the photocopier light rolling over his face all day, flashbulbs. ‘It is,' he says, not lying. He is a man whose failure came for him too young. It hunted him and it shot him down. He blinks, full of dusted-over fantasies. ‘I keep my valuables in the trunk,' he adds, flicking the suitcase closed and handing it to us. There is nothing else there. No ruby pinkie rings, no yearbooks. No wife and no twins.
Immaculata takes the suitcase. Surprised by the heft of it, she steadies herself. The bricks of money too much to tuck into her bobby sock.