When the car door opens I’m already in the driveway. She falls out of the driver’s seat, a jumble of loosely held together bones. I hold my arms out and she flies into me. For a second it’s good, really good, and I pick her up, squeeze her. She reeks of the road and something stronger. She kicks, clipping my shin. Still, it’s good to hug her again.
“Simon, you look like shit.” Her words slip into each other.
“You smell like a brewery.”
“Happens sometimes.” Her laugh doesn’t sound like it comes from her body. She wiggles free.
“You drove like this?”
“Apparently.” She turns slowly, surveying the house, sniffing the air. “So, can I come in, or do I have to stand out here all day?”
“Sure. It’s your house too.” As though I’ve been keeping it for her. “Did you eat?” I look her over, taking her in. Her clothing hangs from her. A long hippie skirt, a huge hoodie—probably a man’s—a T-shirt poking out from underneath, moth holes in the fabric. Under this stuff is my sister.
She shrugs, jerks the screen door open, and then slams it behind her. It’s just me and the car and whatever she’s left behind. I search for her things among heaps of fast food containers, soda bottles, and beer cans. The floor is covered with matchbooks from bars up and down the coast. Burned out lightbulbs are wedged in the backseat. No bags.
“Where’s your stuff?” I yell.
“Trunk. Don’t worry about it. Didn’t bring much,” she calls back.
“Not staying long?” I shut the car door and head inside.
“Don’t know.”
I hear her swear, followed by a tearing sound. Inside I find her standing over Peabody’s book, ripping the sketch I’d just been looking at to shreds.
“Stop it. Why would you do that?” I shout. She flinches and scraps of paper float to the floor. “Do you even know how old that is?”
“Why would you keep that open? You can’t leave things like that lying around.” Her eyes narrow.
“You can’t rip up whatever you feel like. That’s mine.”
“Where did you even get that book? Who has this shit?” Home a few minutes and we’re already at each other. No wonder she left.
“A bookseller gave it to me.” The second I say it, I realize it sounds odd. People don’t give away books like this.
“Of course. Obviously.” She flops down hard onto the gray couch and a dust cloud wafts from the pillows. “You’re going to have to explain. Are you screwing people for books now?”
“No.”
“That’s a shame,” she says.
I tell her about the package and my conversations with Churchwarry. I mention Bess Visser’s name, that Mom knew it also.
She stares at me, suddenly sober. After a long silence she says, “I don’t trust him.” She pulls her knees to her chest, arms around her shins. On her wrist is a small blue tattoo I haven’t seen before. A tiny bird.
“He’s harmless. Actually, he’s pretty entertaining.”
“You’re gullible as hell. What does he want from you?”
I look around. I’ve no money. I have nothing. “He’s just an eccentric. Maybe a little lonely.”
“Are you? Lonely?” she asks. “He got to you about Mom. You’re fixated on her and it makes you an easy mark.” She’s dug her hands into the pockets of her hoodie. They’re working, twisting the fabric and pulling at something inside. “She’s dead, you know, not hiding in a book.”
“It’s hard not to be concerned. That book pointed out something fairly significant: the women in this family have a disturbing way of dying young.”
Her lip twitches with the beginning of a grimace.
I say nothing about the 24th. There are lines I can’t cross with Enola, and I’m edging close to one. “Don’t you want to know why? If there is a why?”
“Not particularly,” she says. “I’d rather just live.”
“In a carnival. And I’m the one obsessed with Mom.”
We glare at each other. She looks away first, picking at her sleeve. It’s difficult seeing her when she’s been gone so long. She could walk away again, right now, and I couldn’t stop her.
“How’ve you been?” I ask.
“Hungry.” She stomps off to the kitchen, a flurry of disjointed movement, feet slapping against chipped linoleum. Slamming drawers. “You’ve got fuck all in here. What do you eat?”
“Left-hand cabinet. Same as before. Third shelf.”
More rummaging. “Ramen? Jesus. What did I even come back here for?”
“I did wonder.”
“And why is all your crap in the living room? Wait, why are you home? Shouldn’t you be working?”
“Budget cuts.” Two deadweight words. I haven’t had to say them yet, not to anyone that’s mattered.
“No librarians on a weekday?”
“No more me. I was let go.”
Just like that her arms are around me again, clinging, like when she was little and wanted me to carry her, like she needs me. “They’re idiots.”
“They’re broke.”
“Only you would make excuses for someone firing you.”
Maybe. “Your turn.”
“My turn, what?” She lets go and heads back to the kitchen, returning with a ramen cake.
“You know why I’m home. Why are you?”
“I wanted to see you. It’s been a while.” It has. It’s hard to look at Enola without thinking of her tossing a backpack into the same car, leaving me. “You should come with me,” she says, breaking off a chunk of dried noodles and popping it into her mouth. “You’re out of a job. The carnival I’m with, Rose’s, it’s nice. Thom Rose likes me; he’d find something for you to do.”
“I’m a librarian.”
“Ex-librarian.” That shouldn’t hurt as much as it does. “You’re a swimmer, too. You could do the dunk tank no problem.” But she’s not thinking about dunk tanks. She flops down on the couch again, crunching on the noodles.
“They’ve got a swimmer.”
“Nope. That was your thing with Mom. I read cards.”
As though I didn’t show her everything that Mom showed me. How to empty your air and stretch your ribs, when to let the water weigh you down, when to smile. I remember her being little, in a polka-dot bathing suit, black hair floating all around her just like Mom’s, smiling at me from the water while I counted.
Eighty-nine Mississippi, ninety Mississippi.
“I’ve got some leads. I have applications out and I’m calling a headhunter tomorrow. I’ll make it work.”
“It’d be fun if you came with me. I worry about you alone in the house.” She looks around, taking in each crack, every hole that’s developed since she left. “I miss you sometimes.”
I sit on the floor, she stays on the couch, but a little of us slips together. “You scared me when you called. Something about a bad reading?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” She picks at the arm of the couch, wiggling a little finger into a hole in the worn fabric. “Why’s your stuff in the front room?”
“It’s easier. The computer’s out here. It’s good for job hunting.”
“The air smells funny. Did it always smell like this?”
“How is it supposed to smell?” It used to smell like coffee and cooking with a little bit of the ocean mixed in. She drops to the floor next to me in a smooth slump, an effortless fall. She picks up an escaped paper, absently bending the edge back and forth, scoring it with her thumbnail.
Circus Ephemera,
1981. A small excerpt about high divers, one that briefly mentions my grandmother. She rolls the edge between a thumb and forefinger, like a European with a cigarette.
“Stop it. Did you come home just to mess with my stuff?”
“Don’t look at me like that. It’s been forever.” She starts to say something else but chooses not to. Instead she says, “I talked to Frank. He says the house might go over.”
“You called Frank? Why would you call Frank?”
“To let him know I was coming by. I thought it’d be good to see him. Is it true?”
“About the house? I don’t know. Maybe.”
“You should come with me.” She reaches over and tugs a book from my desk.
Legends and Poems of the Baltic.
Peter Bolokhovskis, the book Mom read to me. She bends the spine wide, almost breaking it.
“Leave that, okay? That book is hard to find.” And stolen.
She drops it on the couch and it falls open to a picture of a man leaning against a tree by a river. I remember the story. The man is seduced by a water spirit, Rusalka, I think. Half-souled spirits of children and virgin women who died unbaptized. Every culture has water spirits, mermaids, selkies, nixies. In America we don’t name them.
“I’m sorry I left the way I did,” she says.
“Okay.”
“I know you were trying.”
“Thanks.”
She puts her arms around me, her head on my shoulder. We stay this way, looking at the walls, looking anywhere but at each other. She nudges in the direction of a book. “Do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“Read me that. I used to like it when you read to me. Nobody does it once you grow up.”
It’s from the Bolokhovskis
.
She wants me to read
Egl
ė
. I do. Slowly, the way Mom used to, unraveling the story of the farmer’s daughter who would become Queen of the Serpents, and her children who were turned into trembling trees
.
All folktales have a price. Enola listens silently, pressing her forehead to my shoulder, letting me remember her.
Later, when the sun has set, I shift to work the blood back into a pins and needles foot. She says, “It was a long drive and my head is killing me. I need sleep.”
I muss her hair with my knuckles. It mats up in soft, spiky black chunks. I want to ask why she cut it, but don’t. “Your bedroom’s the same. Haven’t touched it.”
She shuffles down the hallway. The door squeaks open. “Couldn’t you at least get a new quilt?” No good nights for us.
* * *
I’m squinting at a bad photocopy when headlights make the room suddenly bright. I look at the clock. Nine-thirty. I was supposed to be at Alice’s at eight. Yes, that’s her car, and yes, that’s her walking up the driveway. Jeans and a T-shirt, hair down. I look around. My things are everywhere, clothing, papers, books, noodle wrappers.
Shit.
I head her off at the front step, leaning against the house, my back on the shingles. It would be good to ask her inside, but her apartment is clean, adult, and has a pillow-mountain bed.
“I completely forgot. I’m so sorry.”
She twirls her keys in her hand, then smacks them against her hip. “You say that a lot.”
“I mean it. Five minutes and I’ll be ready to go.”
“Whose car is that?” She nods at the Olds.
“Enola’s. She came home today. We were talking and the time got away from me.”
“She’s here?” She crosses her arms over her waist, rocking back and forth on her toes. I don’t know what Alice thinks of Enola, not really. Whatever she knows of her is from a long time ago, or from what I’ve said.
Obnoxious, selfish, immature, insane, waste.
I probably said that, probably to Alice. “I should say hi,” she says. A look toward the window. I tell her Enola’s asleep. She raises an eyebrow. “Do you not want me to come in?”
“No. Yes. She really is asleep. I want you to come in, but I’m embarrassed because the place is a wreck, my stuff is everywhere, and I already fucked up tonight.”
She smiles. For a second I do too.
“Okay.” Then she’s past me, barging in before I can stop her.
In the middle of the living room Alice turns a slow circle, like she’s surveying a gallery. Her flip-flops grind sand into the floor. We take it in, the papers, the clothing, the cracks and loose floorboards. I chew my fingers.
“Wow,” she says.
“I know. I’d offer you somewhere to sit, but it’ll have to be the kitchen.”
“No, no. That’s okay.” She looks down the hallway. There are three doors, one has my sister, one isn’t fit for me or a guest, and the other belongs to the dead. We would have to curl up on the couch with my books and clothing. “At work you were always so neat.”
“Escapism?”
She laughs a little. Thank God. I suggest going back to her place. “I only need five minutes.”
She says not to worry about it. “Enola’s here. You guys should spend time together.”
And then she’s on the front step and there’s a perfunctory kiss. Because she’s seen the house or because her parents are across the street? Their porch light is still on. I say I’m sorry again, and this time she takes my hand, giving my fingers a squeeze. There’s a perfect spot between her finger and thumb that’s been made smooth and tough by a fishing rod. A spark runs between us and we hold on for an extra minute.
“Just call next time, okay?”
“Okay,” I say.
I stay outside long after her car is gone.
I email a r
é
sum
é
for a video archive position. Out of my range, but worth a shot. Blue Point sent a message back. Position filled, of course. I listen to the water against the cliff, and let my mind run with thoughts of Alice, of the house falling in the water, of all those drowned women. I try for a while, but sleep won’t come. I give up trying and read.
Later I hear a quiet flicking sound coming from Enola’s room, the gentle slide of paper over paper. I look in. “Hey. You’re awake.”
She sits cross-legged, hunched in the center of her room. Her body sways slightly, as if in prayer. Lines of tarot cards spread across the floor, face up. She lays out six rows, each with six cards, quickly like a blackjack dealer. The cards move like a river. No sooner does she set the last card than she scoops the entire spread in one hand, shuffles, and begins to turn a new series on the floor.
“Enola?”
She doesn’t answer. She’s practicing. She doesn’t need to; her movements are ballet. The deck is heavily worn, the backs faded, dull and yellow. They might have been orange once, maybe red, but are now a suggestion with ragged sides. Old paper, the kind that shouldn’t be in this humidity. It’s difficult to see, but the faces look bold, rough, possibly hand painted. She clears the spread away again, methodical. I watch as she repeats the sequence, shuffling, turning, shuffling. It’s unseeing, compulsive.
I call her name again. She doesn’t hear. Doesn’t see me.
I pull the door closed. I’m in the living room looking at
The Tenets of the Oracle
when I remember. I’ve seen someone deal cards like that before—late at night on our square, metal-edged kitchen table, my father begging her to stop, to come to bed. She continued laying cards, swaying in her chair. The cards skimmed and swished. “Paulina,” he whispered. “Please.”