The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (11 page)

“Of course we can,” Mabel mumbled, her mind caught on the image of her father dead in his box, his head patched. Mabel had not seen his dead body, and no one before had ever described it. She and Lily had been in the country as their mother alone selected a suit, hopefully the blue one he loved.

He’d worn the slick-looking suit backstage at Mabel’s second-grade production of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Mabel was only Hedgehog No. 2 in an old bristly brown costume that smelled of mice, but he brought her a present anyway, a tiny box of candied violets he’d special-ordered from a wedding cake baker. He’d decked Lily out in Mabel’s cast-off green velvet Christmas dress and had strung silk ribbon through her hair. Mabel’s mother stayed at home to nurse another terrible headache.

“Those headaches kick the hell out of her,” Mabel’s father told Mabel’s pretty teacher as she last-minute stitched the ripped lining of Little Red’s cape. “They’re very decapitating.”

“Debilitating,” Miss Wyle corrected with a wink, and Mabel’s father blushed and chuckled and stroked his stubbly chin.

“Yeah, that,” he said, then offered to finish fixing the cape so that she could dash off to look for the lost bottle of wine for Little Red’s basket. The other children, so overwhelmed by the sight of this tall, strange man as he sat in a low, tiny chair, all gathered round to watch him simply sew. “I know that dirty mug,” he said, nodding at a boy who lived down the hall from them in the apartment building. “That face needs to meet the business end of a washcloth.” The kids all yucked it up at that, and Mabel sat on the floor beside her father, her head resting against his leg, so that everyone knew he belonged to her.

He helped Little Red on with her cape and called her “Suzy-Q” even though her name was Bethany. Then he shook her hand and wished her luck. Mabel could recall nothing about the show itself, but afterward her father invited Miss Wyle out for a cup of coffee. The only place open had been a highway convenience store with a few booths in the back; they all shared a few packages of clearance-shelf carrot cake. The adults had coffee and the girls split a 7-Up. Mabel’s father told Miss Wyle about the day Mabel was born, and she reached across to lift his floppy bangs to see the scar on his forehead. Mabel wished her father would marry Miss Wyle. She loved her mother, but she’d always wanted a stepmother too, like other girls had. Stepmothers, she thought, so desperately want love and respect and a place in the family.

After Mrs. Cecil left, Mabel realized she’d been gripping the plastic panther tight in her fist, and now it felt hot, felt like it was throbbing in her hand. Touching it was like touching
at a vein on Lily’s wrist. The panther had not been Lily’s best toy, but Mabel could understand why she had chosen it for their father. The artist had given the cat a wide, comical grin of fanged teeth. The panther burned in Mabel’s hand like a talisman, and she couldn’t wait to show it to Lily. Lily would fall apart at the sight of this secret offering seemingly exhumed from their father’s grave. For even just a moment, Lily was certain to be a broken little girl again, her father’s death new in her heart.

WITH THE PLASTIC PANTHER WARM IN
her fist, Mabel felt drawn toward Stitch Farm. Years before, Brandi, the Stitch girl, had inhaled too much airplane glue from a paper bag on the night of her junior prom. She now sat in a wheelchair, unable to move, barely able to speak, but with a newfound gift. All the farmers’ widows had made pilgrimages to the young woman’s weekly sessions, standing in line with buttons in their fists and cufflinks plucked from their husbands’ funeral shirts. Mr. Stitch would take the items and press them into his daughter’s unfeeling hand, and Brandi would choke out a word or two, a message whispered to her by some voice in an afterlife.

Mabel had always rolled her eyes at Lily, had snapped her gum to show indifference, whenever Lily returned from Stitch Farm dressed in mourning weeds—black blouse, black skirt, her father’s wedding band on a chain around her neck.
After every session Lily had plopped shut-mouthed and gloomy into the sofa cushions, drinking store-bought margaritas straight from the bottle. But Mabel wasn’t as skeptical as she claimed to be. Lily simply needed her to be faithless and free of ghosts, needed Mabel to be the sensible one.

She placed the plastic panther atop the dash of the Jimmy and drove out toward the highway. As a drop of sweat rolled into her eye and burned there, Mabel remembered sitting on the roof of the porch years before as Lily concentrated on a tattered Ouija board. Lily touched the board and asked a question about their dead father’s sadness in life, and the triangle spelled out
JOSHUA
10 13. Mabel had pretended to be absorbed in a book but later looked the verse up in her grandmother’s Bible. “So the sun stood still and the moon stopped,” the passage read.
That’s exactly what everything felt like
, Mabel thought now, wiping away sweat with the back of her hand.

As Mabel approached the dirt road turnoff, she slowly passed two young men pushing a stalled pickup. An older man followed them, hunch-shouldered and wiping his neck with a hanky.
ROSELEAF RANCH
was painted in blue on the faded-to-pink truck. In her rearview mirror, Mabel saw that a boy, about fourteen, oversteered at the wheel. She considered stopping and offering her help, but she figured they’d just laugh at her—four men offered help by a girl.

On the country road, just before the entrance to Stitch Farm, the blossom of a plastic mum flew across Mabel’s windshield, a few broken petals catching in a wiper. She then
noticed all the artificial flowers and silk greenery in the ditch—bouquets stuck into the ground with wires or tied to fence posts. Banners marked
TO MOTHER
and
FOR MY SON
fluttered in the wind, loosened from their wreaths. The farmers’ wives no longer decorated the plots at the county graveyard. Instead, they took their flowers here, preferring to believe their loved ones to be not beneath ground but in the light and wind surrounding Stitch Farm.

Mabel had visited her father’s grave only once, a month or so after his death, to help her grandmother plant a peony bush. On the drive home after, Mabel declared she would never return to the cemetery, as she picked the graveyard’s dirt from beneath her fingernails. She’d hated the tombstone’s bland inscription of
LOVING SON, FATHER, AND HUSBAND
and its ugly gray rose cut into the granite. Now Mabel wished she’d been more devoted, with some simple tradition or ritual of her own. She could have burned a candle one night a year or left a single rose on winter days.

The panther in the front pocket of her blouse, Mabel parked and stepped from the car. As she’d left the shop, she’d taken a garish daisy-print umbrella from the wall to keep the sun from burning her scalp. All the old ladies had warned her that if she ever visited Stitch Farm to drink plenty of water and to eat plenty before; people were forever fainting and swooning there in the summer months.

Mabel opened the umbrella and picked the petals from the windshield wiper, looking out across the farm. The only growth anywhere around was a patch of waist-high wheat, a
circling labyrinth cut into the field.
TAKE A PEACEFUL WALK AND FIND YOUR CENTER
—$5, the sign proclaimed. She watched, amused, as people stumbled, dizzied from the twists of the field.

Mabel recognized an old woman sitting on a rusted tractor plow overgrown with weeds and black-eyed susans—Mrs. Lindley, who raised emu. Mrs. Lindley clutched a black tube of sunblock in her fist: SPF 50. “I’m glad you finally came out to see Brandi Stitch,” Mrs. Lindley said. “What’d you bring to show her?”

“Nothing,” Mabel said. She wanted to keep the panther mostly unseen, to keep it her own secret for as long as she could. Too many questions about it, too much explanation, might take away its power.

Mrs. Lindley held forth a dime. “I found this in the pocket of one of Mr. Lindley’s trousers that I’d boxed up years ago,” she said. “Brandi’s finally going to be able to reveal it all to me this time, I’m certain. I just have a feeling about it. It’s evidence, of some kind, this coin, of an affair that he had a few years before he died. I just know it. This is change back from something he bought for her. A Hallmark card maybe. Maybe violets.”

Just a dime
, Mabel thought, touching at her pocket, at the panther inside.
How sad
.

A cobblestone walk led Mabel and Mrs. Lindley toward the tin-roof lean-to in the pasture, under which Brandi did all her communing with the dead. A crowd gathered at the fence, many standing up on the slats like at a rodeo. Everyone
craned their necks to try to see into the lean-to just yards from the padlocked gate. Shadows stretched and moved across the ground as workers, hidden by the tin wall, prepared for the morning’s seance. Mabel could hear country music buzzing from broken speakers. The sun was already beating down, and Mabel held her umbrella above Mrs. Lindley’s head. Despite the sun block, Mrs. Lindley’s bleach-white skin cooked swiftly to pink.

As Mr. Stitch stepped from around the lean-to, as the people caught their breath with anticipation, Mabel wanted to rush away from the whole event, to once again be a person too serious for Stitch Farm. The man looked silly with a long peacock feather stuck in the band of his straw cowboy hat. Mabel giggled, both nervous and embarrassed, at the feather bristling and fluttering in the wind, strutting, like it was still attached to its bird.

But when Mr. Stitch beckoned the crowd, saying, “Come to Brandi,” in a deep and kind voice as he unhitched the fence gate, Mabel stepped forward. His chin was stubbly and gray. No one had ironed his shirt. He’d lost his little girl, basically, and what could be worse?

She dropped a donation into an overflowing kettle as she followed the crowd around the corner of the lean-to. Some cotton-candy-scented candles flickered in jelly jars lined up atop a railroad tie on the ground. Mabel walked along the tin wall; stretched across the front of it was a coiling barbed wire. To the barbs, people had stuck photos, newspaper clippings, wedding invitations, hospital bracelets. People had signed
their names to poems and prayers they hadn’t written, about serenity and footsteps in the sand. Mabel took from her pocket a clipping she had cut for Lily, an article about a Coney Island amusement park ride spinning off its axis and severing the leg of a woman. She gingerly placed the clipping in the curl of the concertina wire. A woman smiled at Mabel as she tied a frayed hair ribbon to the wire, and Mabel blushed, feeling welcomed into the terrible miseries they were all there to share.

Mr. Stitch pushed Brandi’s wheelchair out to the lip of a pickup’s open tailgate. Brandi, now a woman of about twenty-five, had to have been sweltering in her raggedy cashmere suit. The suit’s skirt showed many snags from the edges of the chair. “That’s the suit Sally Jessy gave her for the show they did,” Mrs. Lindley whispered to Mabel. Mabel remembered having heard about Brandi’s appearance on Sally Jessy. It had to have been five years, or more, before.

Mr. Stitch stood beside Brandi and began without ceremony. He held out his arms, his palms up and open, wiggling his fingers. “Anybody got something?” he asked the crowd. Two women stepped forward, one holding out what looked to be a piece of string. Mr. Stitch took it from her, balled it up, and put it into Brandi’s hand. He then leaned over, putting his ear to Brandi’s lips, hiding her blank face from everyone. He straightened up and returned the string. “She says, ’A hat,’ ” he said.

“A hat?” the woman mumbled.

“A hat?” the other woman said.

The crowd waited silently for the women to make some connection. Mabel pictured a straw hat and a colorful scarf. A hat, she whispered, desperate for the women to find their way back to a particular sunny afternoon.

“Oh, yes,” the woman with the string finally said. “Oh, oh, yes.” She put her hands to her face and cried. “A hat,” she sobbed. “Of course. The hat.” Her friend took her by the shoulders and directed her back toward the gate.

People stepped forward, one by one, with their bits of cloth and pieces of jewelry and letters bound with ribbon. ” ‘A flower,’” Mr. Stitch imparted. A
book. A picture. A necktie. A map
. Some merely shrugged and walked away, but most collapsed in heartbreak and tears. The panther felt heavy in Mabel’s front pocket, and she could feel its edges pressing into her breast, could feel its tiny claws scratching for purchase. Her heart beat fast with both her belief and her disbelief. She so wanted to fall apart, but she knew that whatever Mr. Stitch told her, whatever words Brandi passed on from beyond a supposed grave, would be meaningless. But she also knew she’d return to Stitch Farm with everything she could find that her father had touched. If Mr. Stitch said the right word in the right way it might work, she thought. I could be haunted too.

With all the shade from the umbrella working to keep pale Mrs. Lindley from sizzling away to nothing, Mabel felt the sun’s heat weaken her knees and ankles. She noticed a few people fall slowly to the ground, some with something like a Hallelujah wail, almost gleeful in their pain. Mabel lowered
herself to the dirt, then became frightened by all the crazies towering above her, mere footsteps from trampling her. But she was too dizzy to move. “Do you need my sunblock, Mabel?” Mrs. Lindley said, as Mabel pressed both hands to the ground to feel still. She closed her eyes and all the most banal junk of her life swam among the dots of her vision—just spoons and forks, pairs of scissors, shoelaces, pencils, light bulbs. She then saw her mother, her mind lost, on one hectic afternoon with her coat over a flesh-colored slip, frayed lace at her knees. That day, months before her father’s suicide, Mabel’s mother went from store to store secretly slipping her things from her deep coat pockets onto the shelves in a kind of reverse kleptomania. She left a Hummel among boxes of cough elixir in a drugstore, her wedding ring in a china cup in a department store. In a dress shop, she took a Swiss Army knife from her coat pocket and dropped it into the pocket of a coat on a mannequin. Mabel and Lily ran along behind her, huffing and puffing and tumbling over each other’s legs as they struggled to keep up with their mother’s quick pace. Lily, frightened, had put her hand in Mabel’s pocket.