“Rose’s was coming by anyway. I asked Thom if I could take time to see you. I thought maybe we could talk.” We watch waves grind sand until mosquitoes start in at us. She smacks one. “I do love you some.” Some. It’s what she’s always said, but the way she says it is better than if she’d said she loves me wholly. Those years we were alone, maybe I didn’t do so badly. We pick our way through brush and poison ivy to the path leading to the house. Her hands slip back into her skirt pocket and I hear the slide of paper against paper.
A beaten-up yellow car sits in our driveway—not hers. A lean form stands by it, arm propped on the hood. The figure could not be more striking. Serpentine and crawling with unknown potential.
Enola breathes deep like a diver, shrieks, and takes off running. “Doyle!” Unrestrained joy. Then she’s in this person’s arms, looping her legs around his body. Her shoulders block his face. All I can see are two skinny—tattooed—arms around her waist.
He twirls around, back to me, and she is up against his car. I jog over. Without looking, Enola says, “This is my brother, Simon.”
“Hey. Heard a lot about you. Don’t worry, it’s all good.” A voice made of casual and surf. His hands stay on my sister’s hips. He spares no glance my way, allowing me to stare at a line of tattoos that creep up the side of his neck, over his shaved head, ending in dark green tentacles that wind along his jaw.
“Simon, this is Doyle.”
I say I’m delighted to meet him. I’m not sure what else I say, because I can’t stop staring. Nobody gets a tattoo like this unless they’re actively courting gawkers. The ink slithers as he talks, tentacles writhing over skin. I feel sick. They pull apart.
“Long drive,” he says and stretches, sleeves sliding up to reveal more ink, more tentacles. Does it cover his entire body?
“I didn’t know you were coming,” she says.
He nuzzles her neck, unmindful of my presence, and mumbles something about needing to “siphon the python” and heads into the house. Enola trails behind him, almost skipping. I catch up and put a hand on her shoulder, stopping her short.
“Who is he?”
“Told you. Doyle.”
“And what is a Doyle?”
“A Doyle is a guy who drove a really long way because I told him I was going to see my brother. Be nice,” she says and follows him. Over her shoulder she adds, “We fuck.” There are few things with more visceral power than the sudden awareness that your sister has sex. The image of tentacled arms is too much. It is a full five minutes before I can go inside.
* * *
Doyle is sprawled across my sofa, my bed. I pull my chair into the middle of the room and sit in front of him. Yes, there are tentacles crawling up his arms and face. I can see the fine lines of each elliptical sucker. Enola shuffles pots around in the kitchen. For the moment Doyle and I are alone. There’s a shiftiness to his pointed features. If I turned on the lights he’d skitter behind the couch.
“Wild place you got, man. Wild,” he says. “Your house is pretty much hanging off the cliff.”
“Erosion. It’s a problem around here,” I say.
We fuck,
she said. This thing copulates with my sister.
“Yeah, yeah. That’s right,” he laughs. A lazy half wheeze. “I’m shit at remembering stuff like that.” He makes a twitching gesture. His hand is also covered with tattoos. Squid? Octopi? “Slept through earth science.”
“So you and my sister.”
“Yeah. She’s a down chick, you know? Real cool.”
I stare.
Enola returns with a box of cookies I’d forgotten about. She flops on the couch, draping herself over Doyle. Neither minds that they’re in my bed. She feeds him a stale cookie and asks if we’re getting along. Of course we are. Just beautifully.
“How did the two of you meet?”
“In Atlantic City, on the Boardwalk,” she says. So this is the one.
“Yeah. She had her cards out and I thought, man, that’s a sweet little bird.”
He might not see the murder in me but Enola does. She puts her arm around his shoulders and the pale underside of her wrist attaches itself to his tattoo’s suction cups. I ask what he does.
“I’m the Electric Boy.” The lightbulbs in the back of her car begin to make sense.
“What exactly is the Electric Boy?” I lean back in my chair, almost tipping it. I know what’s coming.
Enola cuts him off before he can answer. “You know, the Human Lightbulb?”
I nod. It’s a static electricity act, pedestrian really, the sort of thing that’s popped up since the discovery of electric current. Sometimes it’s a deferral of current trick with a hidden metal plate; that’s how they work electric chair acts. Nothing special.
“Doyle can light a hundred-watt bulb with his mouth and three in each hand,” she says.
That
is different. “Impressive.”
“He does contact juggling with the bulbs while they’re lit. It’s crazy beautiful.”
“Uh-huh.” A tentacle-covered man juggling lightbulbs sounds gorgeous.
“I’ll show you. Little Bird, where do you keep the bulbs?” He starts to get up but Enola shakes her head.
“Don’t bother,” she says. Doyle looks at her. “You can show him later, okay? You didn’t bring beer by any chance, did you? Simon’s got fuck all and I could kill for a beer.”
“Sure thing,” he says. He oozes from the room.
Enola leans forward, hands on her knees, and I spot the tattoo on her wrist again. A little bird. Jesus. “Quit being a bastard and pretend you like him. For me, okay?”
“I’m not being a bastard, I’m being your brother.”
“Well, that’s new,” she snaps. It’s true. I’ve been a parent, not a brother.
“I’m just concerned, okay? I know nothing about him.” Or her, for that matter.
“For once, can you just be a little nice?”
“I’ll try.”
Doyle lopes back in, six-pack in hand. “Want one?”
“Sure, thanks.” His tattooed finger pops open a can, and all I can think about is having needles so close to the nail bed. He catches me staring, so I ask, “That hurt?”
“Like a sonofabitch.” He smiles and clicks his teeth together.
“Good beer,” I say. It tastes like warm piss.
We drink in relative silence, which is me being nice. After another drink they begin chattering to each other. Names are tossed around—friends, cities, towns. She giggles, a different person from the one I saw last night. I glance over at the book. I’m missing something.
Neither minds when I flip through a few pages. Later, Enola drags him out to the bluffs to watch the sun brush the water. I am left alone with my books.
At some point music drifts in and I look out the window to see the moon and the dome light from her car. The driveway is bathed in blue and they’re dancing. She is frenzied motion, elbows flinging, hips shimmying, dancing and detonating. Sweat covers her, eating moonlight as she sidles against him. Doyle flows over her as if held together by a thin layer of ink. The car shakes with bass vibration. A slower song comes on and they mesh their skin, fingers entwined. They’ve ceased to know I’m here. Like they never knew.
Alice answers the phone, sleepy, soft-sounding. “Hey. What’s up?”
“Do you want to go out? Are you up for a drink? I need a drink.”
She yawns and I hear the pop of her jaw on the receiver. “I’ve got work tomorrow.” There’s a small silence between us before she says a quick, “Sorry. That came out wrong. What’s up?”
“Nothing. Just a little stir-crazy, I guess. Enola’s boyfriend showed up. Too many people in a small house.” Never mind that four of us once rattled around here.
“And here I was hoping you’d say you miss me.”
I do. I miss her walking up the library steps. I miss her writing the program schedule on a white board and the curl of her lowercase
g
. I miss the Alice I don’t see anymore. “Sorry. I’m just off. It’s weird seeing my sister’s mating dance.”
“I’ve never felt so lucky to be an only child.” She yawns again and I know I should let her go. “Tomorrow, okay?” she says. “I promise.”
“Sure, sure.” Then she’s gone. I could have told her about the money, how much I need, but I’m not there yet. Close, but not yet. I turn my computer on and dash off an email to Liz Reed, asking if the situation at North Isle’s changed at all, that part time would be fine if that’s all there is. My inbox is empty but for a lone response to an application. The interlibrary coordinator position at Commack has been filled internally. I scroll through the listserv again, looking for changes, new positions. I think of things to call myself—Information Specialist, Information Technician, Information Resource Manager—I can be anything a job wants me to be. Eventually words blur and there’s sand behind my eyelids.
I wake not with the sun but with a light in the window that pulses like a heartbeat. Doyle is in the driveway, a moving shadow except for his hands, which are lit by two forty-watt lightbulbs. He spins the bulbs, balancing them, passing them over the backs of his hands in smooth waves. The rolling incandescence illuminates small portions of the tattoo, a diver shining a lamp into darkness. Tentacles curl and ripple. A flash of light, movement, then gone. The lights roll across his chest, his face briefly visible in their glow. White teeth. Then black. The light moves, Doyle extends, dances. The undulating light passes across my sister, leaning against the car. Watching.
He’s performing. For her.
I watch until it feels like spying, then close the window shade. Light leaks through. I go back to the book, to my notebook and the names. It’s time to do a little math. Verona Bonn was born in 1935, making her twenty-seven when she drowned. Her mother, Celine Duvel, died in 1937, when Verona was two—the same age as Enola when Mom died. Celine’s obituary doesn’t list a date of birth. A short amount of digging on the computer turns up a marriage license between a Celine Trammel and Jack Duvel. Her date of birth is February 13th, 1912; that’s twenty-five years old when she died. Young, but not the same age as my mother or grandmother. No, there’s something different.
The telephone rings. It’s Churchwarry.
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” he says. We both know he hasn’t, but I make polite assurances.
“No, it’s fine. What’s the matter?”
“Nights and an old dog. Sheila can’t make it through a night without a walk anymore and Marie has declared that my duty. These days once I’m up, I’m up.”
I understand the feeling.
“I found a book that I think you might find useful. I was wondering what might be the best way to get it to you? It’s rather heavy.”
“Overnight it.”
The mermaid’s shifting woke Amos from dreamless sleep. Frayed thumping filled his chest as he recalled her frightened eyes, how he’d held her, and the deep satisfaction of touching another skin to skin. Evangeline blinked, eyes dim with sleep and morning. He brushed her hair from her shoulder and smiled, an expression that felt stretched and unfamiliar. He pressed his fingers to the curve of her collarbone then to his own.
Evangeline shrieked and scrambled from the tub, knocking Amos back and jarring his bones against the slats. She fled, skirts trailing behind.
He waited. She would come back, if only because there was nowhere to go. Though Peabody and Ryzhkova’s schooling had imparted a loosely civilized veneer, his patience remained weak. A quarter hour’s time had him searching. Finding her wasn’t difficult; humidity made the ground soft so that each step left a perfect impression, the curve of her instep, a divot from the ball of her foot. He followed her steps as he had so many deer paths.
He found her under an elm, crying and crumpled like discarded cloth. So much water from one woman, as if she held a lake inside; his animal heart knew that he and she were made of different things. He waved in greeting, but her head remained tucked against her knees. He wanted to call out, to see how her name felt on his lips. To show he meant no harm, he tipped his head and lightly touched her shoulder.
She brushed him away. “Go. Please.”
He sat beside her. She rocked, cried, and refused to face him. He wrapped his arms around her, light enough to pull away in case she struck him. She gasped and it sounded like a breaking river.
Meixel cooed to the horses after rowdy towns, Peabody sang when writing, and Benno hummed when fixing axles—Amos wanted these things for himself. He held Evangeline, pressed his forehead to her shoulder, and matched his breath to the rise and fall of her sobs. From his throat came keening like bullfrog rattling and squealing wagons; sound, but not voice. Startled, he snapped his jaw closed and hid his face.
“Is that your voice?” A soft question.
He shook his head, pressing his lips together until they hurt.
“You made a sound. I heard.”
He shook his head; it was all he could do but not nearly enough.
“From sound comes speech,” she said.
He wanted it to be true, but knew his tongue to be unwilling, and his mind unable to fathom summoning sound, or how to make it pleasing. He shut his eyes against an unfamiliar sting.
Evangeline began to extricate herself from his arms. “We can’t stay like this,” she said. “I think it best I go, lest we be seen. Neither of us need mention what happened.”
He wanted her to stay until his breath felt right again, but she wiped her eyes and stood. Before leaving she paused, a curious expression crossing her face. “You must stop looking after me, Amos. No one need look after me.”
He watched her weave through the trees toward the wagons, and the burning in his gut intensified; he had felt the sensation before—shame. He tried to slow his heart and feel its place in the air, but peace did not come. Frustrated, he attempted a shout, but produced no sound. He had to speak. Hours slipped by while he worked the problem until the answer appeared as an image: the Fool.
He sprinted toward the wagons. In chance moments his feet settled into Evangeline’s footprints and her warmth seeped into him.
Stealing the cards wasn’t difficult. Harsh swearing from Peabody’s wagon told Amos that Ryzhkova was settling her accounts. Departing a town required Peabody’s review of the run’s expenses and earnings. All finances were handled in the menagerie master’s wagon, and Ryzhkova kept as tight a fist on her money as Peabody. The cards were unwatched.