The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (13 page)

The waitress smiled only a little, leaving the table as
quickly as she could. “What’s it like to think about suicide?” Lily said, lighting a cigarette.

“It’s on your mind all the time,” he said, smiling with lips closed. “It’s like having a crush on a mean girl.” Despite Jordan’s scarred wrist, he didn’t understand anything, Lily thought, about the possibility of death.

She thought about how easy it would be to pick up the steak knife at her elbow and poke him, just a little. “You know,” she whispered, her finger tapping the knife, “I could give you another scar. But I won’t because you’d probably welcome it, probably want the scar so there would be something you could show off, so everyone could know how crazy your wife was. I can just see you in some bar with some other woman. ’I was just sitting there sucking on a cough drop,’ you’d say.” She thought about how little it would take to blind him if she wanted to. It seemed a miracle that most people made it through life with their eyes still in their heads, considering all the carelessness in the world.

“Marrying you off to that mechanic is sounding better by the minute,” Jordan said.

“Let me read your fortune,” she said, taking the palmistry book from her purse. She held the book open with one hand and, with her other, ran the burning coal of her cigarette just above the lines of his palm. “Not good,” Lily said, though she didn’t fully understand the book. The instructions seemed to be poorly translated from a foreign language. “Your liver line is bleeding into your kidney line.” Jordan kept his palm open, even as Lily put the cigarette closer and closer to his skin.
They looked into each other’s eyes, each of them waiting for the other to flinch.

“Ow,” Jordan finally said, squealing like a girl, snapping his hand back. “Fuck you.” He left the table and walked to the restroom. The blue ink on Lily’s hand, the questions for her mother she’d jotted down, had not yet washed all away. The words up her arm now looked like fading bruises, needle tracks. She regretted mentioning the mechanic. She looked forward to marrying Jordan, to their locking themselves up in a motel’s honeymoon suite, to exist there like vacationers during a tropical storm. They could mix martinis in the plastic ice bucket and rent soft-porn pay-per-view. Or they could watch the Vegas tourist channel all night, happy to be missing it all.

Lily noticed an elderly couple across the restaurant watching her. There may have been some worry, some pinch of concern, on the faces of the couple, she thought. They may have sensed a doomed, short-lived matrimony for Lily and Jordan, but Lily didn’t mind their judgment. She even felt a little flattered—they must have recognized her maturity, she thought. They wondered how such a smart woman would cope with such a gangly, childish, near-miscreant for a husband.

Jordan returned to the table, but didn’t sit down. He reached into the pocket of his tight jeans. “Let’s do this like we’re supposed to,” he said, holding up an antique ring. “Will you marry me?” The licorice smell of his cough drop reminded her of winter.

“Yes,” she said. When Jordan took her hand, Lily pictured
herself in bed with him years and years in the future, and she imagined waking and finding he’d died in his sleep. What would it be like to wake without him that morning, after years of getting up together and sharing a simple breakfast in a familiar nook? How painful would it be? She saw her old-lady’s hand touching the cold skin of Jordan’s cheek. There was so much she never wanted to learn about herself.

MABEL HAD CONSIDERED A DISGUISE
for watching Mr. Roseleaf and his sons. In the antique shop, a collection of wigs and wiglets were pinned to faceless Styrofoam heads lined up on a vanity. Mabel and Lily used to wear the wigs when they played “Divorcées Having Pepsi at Three,” a soap opera they invented. Lily always wore the Ginny, a butch brunette with uneven bangs, and Mabel wore the Sheila, a permed and almost-orange red.

But Mabel decided there was no need for a costume—the Roseleafs never seemed to notice anyone. She put on the cherry-print dress Lily had worn the other night. It was too big for Mabel, so she wore a beaded sweater over her shoulders. The nights were cooling off.

She drove to the corner café of the little town of Willow, the next town over from Bonnevilla. The café was a place everybody called Closed Mondays because those were the
only words left on the faded sign. Inside, the Roseleafs had shoehorned themselves into a tiny booth in the corner. Wyatt, the oldest son, a man in his mid-twenties, unscrewed the bulb of the lamp above the table, and the family sat unspeaking and huddled together, watching their dark reflections in their cups of decaf. One brother poured Sugar Twin into another brother’s cup. One dabbed up the other’s spilled coffee with the cuff of his own sleeve. Another scratched the father’s back, and the father straightened another’s collar.

Old Mrs. Lindley had seemed to know a lot about the Roseleafs: Wyatt’s father had been a fan of western novels, and had named his boys after Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, and Buffalo Bill Cody. The sister’s name—Callie—came from Calamity Jane. But all that the boys’ mother had ever read was the Bible and her subscription to a monthly devotional called
Portals of Prayer
. A few years after Callie’s death, Mrs. Roseleaf left her family to work at an orphanage in Nicaragua.

At a table across the café, Mabel wrapped up her french fries in a square of newspaper, paid her bill, and left Closed Mondays. As she drove into the country, she steered with one hand and, with the other, held open a brochure for an eye bank.

Cornea transplants
, Mabel read,
have a success rate of more than 90 percent. Each year, over 35,000 cornea transplants are performed
.

Mabel had once read in the newspaper of a young man who befriended the mother of the girl whose eyes he’d
received. They’d become quite close and spent holidays together. Mabel wasn’t proud of the story she was inventing for herself, but she longed to sit in the rooms of the Roseleaf family, having so simply woven her way into the intricacies of their misery. “I received your sister’s eyes,” Mabel rehearsed out loud in the car. There was something poetic about the sound of it, something welcome. It was almost like something out of an old movie, a women’s weepie, Mabel thought.

But she only knew what Mrs. Lindley had told her at Stitch Farm. The Roseleafs might not have donated Callie’s eyes or any other organs. In their religious fervor, they could have refused donation afraid that Callie would be risen again when the world ended, blinded and with no heart beating in her chest. And why shouldn’t they, Mabel realized, why shouldn’t the family of a dead child deny all beggars everything? All life taken from a child, and the world wants to take more?
No
, Mabel would have said to all the thousands of people dying without Callie’s heart and liver and kidneys, burying her daughter complete and deep in the ground.

Mabel drove for twenty minutes before reaching the broken fences surrounding the Roseleaf Ranch. After parking next to the tall brick wall at the backyard, she got out and stood on the hood to see over. Despite the great heat of that summer, the swimming pool sat empty. The cracked floor of the pool was littered with beer cans and the broken twigs of an old tree shading the yard. Mabel kicked off her clunky sandals and hitched up her dress to crawl over the wall, then dropped down into the shallow end of the pool. She followed
the sloping floor toward the drain that had trapped Callie Roseleaf. Among the leaves and the mulch were tiny pieces of colorful, burned paper, red and yellow and green. She picked up a piece and realized it was the popped husk of a firecracker.

At the deep end of the pool were childlike paintings of fish. Mabel walked to the side and wiped some dirt away with the palm of her hand. Each weathered fish had been signed by one of the Roseleaf children. Callie’s fish was pink with little blue bubbles of air leaving its lips and forming into the shape of a heart.

Cody had painted a simple, child-like curlicue of a fish. Jesse’s fish had fangs and spiky fins. Wyatt’s fish wore a derby hat and smoked a pipe. Mabel brushed away more dirt and saw that this little school followed
DAD
—a Poseidon with long beard and triton—and
MOM
—a redheaded mermaid in a clamshell bra. Mabel realized that Callie, trapped by the drain, would have looked at these paintings as she waited for her next breath of air from one of her brothers. She would have comforted herself with memories of the day they painted the fish—the whole family standing in the empty pool with their brushes and wearing their button-up shirts back-to-front as smocks.

Mabel walked over to the drain. She reached her hands above her head and looked up to where the surface of water would have waved and broke and trapped the bolts of sunlight. She closed her eyes and saw the bubbles of air rolling off the back of one brother, then another, then another, as
they dove toward her, then back up again, then back down again. One pressed his lips to hers, and she took his hot breath in her cold mouth. She touched his cheek, maybe, and maybe his throat; maybe she flicked her tongue in his mouth, just for a taste. Then with all his breath sucked into her lungs, she released him. She was the tragic heroine of a backyard water ballet, the littlest mermaid trapped by her fin, or maybe it was nothing like that at all. Maybe she scratched and clawed them as they tried to leave her, pulling hard at their arms and their kicking legs. Maybe the Roseleaf family nursed their cuts and bruises for weeks after Callie’s death.

Mabel took Lily’s plastic panther from her pocket. Without much thought, she leaned down and dropped the panther through the cracked drain cover. It was a symbolic gesture, Mabel decided, of some sort or other. She squatted and looked in, and she could still see the panther’s bright red open mouth. As she stuck her finger in, to knock the panther farther down, she was startled by the thought that she might never see Lily and Jordan again. They’d love to live a life in secret, Mabel knew, taking an apartment at the edge of a dismal town, blowing their low wages on pickle cards and crime novels. Lily would cherish the power of withholding her existence from Mabel and all the others who missed her. Jordan would just go along with it, thinking Lily loved him more for the effort.

Mabel pinched at her naked finger, almost feeling the antique ring Jordan had put on her hand in the opera house. She closed her eyes, and she could feel the press of his lips so
surely that she wondered if he kissed Lily just then somewhere in Mexico.

Shouts and the crashing of something heavy breaking in the house interrupted Mabel’s thoughts, and she ran up to the shallow end of the pool. She kept hunched low, crouching lower and lower as the floor inclined. At the end, she squatted, poking her head up over the edge. She could see through the glass patio doors. The Roseleafs had returned, and Wyatt yelled at Jesse while their father and brother rushed upstairs to get out of the way. Wyatt was too angry to be understood, his voice cracking with tears and his words running together. He grabbed Jesse by the front of his camouflage T-shirt and screamed into his face, then shoved him into a chair. He shouted some more, waving his arms, slapping a farm cap from Jesse’s head. Finally, Jesse, convulsing with tears of his own, lunged for Wyatt, and they fell back into a sideboard that rattled with silver tea things.

Mabel could no longer see the men when they dropped to the floor, but she could hear all the thump and rumble, and she could see the glass of the patio doors shiver with the fight. She wondered if she should intervene; brothers fought to the death, she imagined.

But in only minutes Wyatt stood from the floor, the fight apparently finished, and he helped Jesse up. Jesse put his fingers to a cut on Wyatt’s forehead, but Wyatt slapped Jesse’s hand away. Jesse shrugged and went up some stairs.

When Wyatt looked directly at Mabel, she dropped down low and held her breath, hoping he’d only seen his own reflection
in the glass. She wished for some wide-lensed sunglasses and the Beret, a feathered, ash-blond wig from the shop. She heard the patio door slide open and the scratch of Wyatt’s boots as he dragged his feet, sluggish, across the tile.

Though Mabel sat clutching her knees, her eyes shut tight, she knew Wyatt stood above her at the edge of the pool. She could feel his cool shadow across her hot face. “I know who you are,” he said. Mabel didn’t answer, and he said it again, and he kicked at some pebbles that fell against her back.

She stood up, brushing dirt from her dress, pulling a few pebbles from her ponytail.
Who am I
? she almost said.

“You’re the girl who’s been following us,” Wyatt said. ’You were at Stitch Farm and at Closed Mondays the last few evenings. You’ve made me curious.” A drop of blood rolled down past his eye, and he smiled, unnoticing. He looked so innocent, pressing at a bruise on his forearm, his mussed hair rooster-tailing, that Mabel didn’t worry about being caught. Even the fight, now that it was over, seemed somehow sweet-intentioned.

“You’re bleeding,” she said.

“We haven’t had too many girls sneak into the pool since we’ve kept it empty.” He winked at Mabel.

“Do you have a first-aid kit?” Mabel said.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Mabel took the handkerchief she’d wrapped the panther in and held it up to him.

“I really don’t want to bleed on it,” he said, even as he took
it from her and dabbed it at his forehead. Mabel climbed from the pool, and Wyatt led her to a bathroom with a tall cabinet that spilled over with salves and unguents, suppressants and lozenges, and Band-Aids for wounds of every shape and size. Mabel lowered the toilet lid for Wyatt to sit, and she grabbed some rubbing alcohol and a handful of cotton balls. After she cleaned Wyatt’s forehead, she applied a butterfly bandage then bit at a roll of gauze to tear off a square. Though Mabel had always been the fragile one, it had been Lily who’d always required care and pharmaceuticals. As far back as Mabel could remember she’d doctored Lily with the long-expired remedies in her grandmother’s medicine chest. Mabel had even been known to coax Lily up trees and beneath hedges of thorns, just to have a new wound to explore. “What were you guys fighting about?” Mabel said.