The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (15 page)

WHEN THEY RETURNED
to the Roseleaf house, all the lights inside were out, and Mabel saw the dot of a candle flame at the window. She and Wyatt ran in to the front room, both of them soaked, and Mr. Roseleaf tossed them each a beach towel. “They think they spotted a funnel,” he said with a smile, a transistor radio held at his ear.

“This is Mabel, this is Tyrone Roseleaf,” was all Wyatt said in the way of introduction.

“What’re you kids drinking tonight?” Mr. Roseleaf said.

“One old-fashioned,” Wyatt said. “Cocktail?” he said to Mabel.

“I dunno,” Mabel said, reaching back to twist the rain out of her ponytail. “What’s good?”

“Anything that doesn’t need water,” Mr. Roseleaf said. “No pump without electricity.”

“I’ll have a vodka gimlet,” Mabel said, just because she liked the sound of it. It seemed what Ingrid Bergman would drink in a Hitchcock movie.

“You heard the girl, Daddy,” Wyatt said, taking Mabel by the hand and rushing her down the shag-carpeted basement steps. Jesse and Cody were on the floor, drinking highballs and playing poker with sticks of gum by flashlight. Cody tossed back a shot of something clear and shuddered as if from hearing fingernails on a blackboard. “Put away the nudie cards, boys,” Wyatt said. “A lady’s present.” Cody slapped at Wyatt’s ankle as Wyatt took Mabel close for a dance. Their clothes very wet, Mabel got a chill and stifled a sneeze. “On rainy days,” Wyatt said, nodding toward an old Bakelite battery-operated, “that little AM station in Bonnevilla goes all Louis Prima, between the weather alerts.” Wyatt rocked his shoulders, singing along to “Banana Split for My Baby,” and held his hand low on Mabel’s back. Mr. Roseleaf stepped up to them with a tray of drinks. A penlight in his mouth gave the bourbon a red glow from the maraschino cherry.

The first sip of the gimlet sent a tingle clear to Mabel’s fingertips. Another sip, and she had to have a seat in a corner recliner. She realized she hadn’t eaten anything all day but a
few fries at Closed Mondays. She wished she’d asked for the old-fashioned, so at least she’d have the cherry to eat.

Wyatt and Mr. Roseleaf sat down to the game of poker, Wyatt next to Jesse like they hadn’t had the knock-down, drag-out just a few hours before. Mabel refused the invitation to join them; instead she kicked her feet up in the recliner and watched the boys fancy-shuffle the cards and announce each game with a sharp’s side-of-the-mouth mutter: Devil’s Weed and Double-Humped Deuces Wild; Pretty Maids in a Row with Diamond Ear Bobs; The Queen’s Been Raped and All the Knaves Are Guilty.

Later in the evening, the rain stopped, the wind no longer shaking the glass of the narrow basement window. Mabel even thought she saw some light beneath the door at the top of the basement steps. But the Roseleafs ignored the electricity and continued with their happy hour in the dark. Mabel pinched her nose and downed another glass of vodka, determined to learn to love the booze, so she’d be invited down in future storms.

Back at her own house, she’d often dragged Lily into a closet for disaster preparation. Mabel, a stubborn little girl, had never believed that hurricanes would not touch them so many miles from the shore and that earthquakes only happened on fault lines. A box in the closet contained only necessities: cans of Spaghetti-Os and Spam and Vienna sausages, a crystal radio Mabel had built from a paper kit, a book, dated 1909, on wolf and coyote trapping.
If you are using small animals for bait
, Mabel had read aloud, by candlelight, to Lily in
the closet,
such as jack rabbits, cotton-tails, prairie dogs, badgers, or sage hens, use the whole animal, if your method will allow of it, and do not skin the bait, as that will make the coyote or wolf suspicious
.

Mabel drifted off to sleep, and she dreamed that Lily tried to kill her with ladybugs, lettuce, and gasoline. When she woke, the moon was out from behind the shreds of clouds. All the Roseleafs were asleep on the basement floor. Mabel wanted to wake them and continue with their party in this cramped basement room. The night reminded her of the scene in
Some Like It Hot
, when all the band members toss a party in Jack Lemmon’s sleeping compartment on the train, mixing their drinks in a hot-water bottle. Mabel had seen the movie as a little girl and had always longed to be invited to an impromptu midnight party in a tiny space.

Mabel’s dress was still wet and cold, so she took it off and crawled, in her bra and underwear, to Wyatt. She put her nose to his throat to smell his aftershave. She noticed the dry skin on his neck, peeling from a sunburn, and she peeled a piece away. Lily burned every summer and her dry skin flaked off in sheets. She let Mabel peel at the dead skin as she sat in her bikini, her back bare. The simple act had so satisfied Mabel that she’d often picked Lily’s skin sore.

Mabel put her ear to Wyatt’s lips to try to hear what he mumbled in his sleep. When he stopped talking, she held her mouth above his, stealing the taste of candied cherries and whiskey. She breathed in his sleeping breath, breath that had
helped keep his sister alive for a while as she perished at the very bottom of the pool.

Mabel was afraid for that day when Wyatt learned of her deception. She thought of those mothers she read about in a magazine—women who secretly poisoned and sickened their children in order to bask in the attention of doctors and nurses when they carried their babies into hospitals. The mothers were said to have “Munchausen syndrome by proxy,” a name Mabel loved. Mabel realized she must have a similar syndrome, in her lying to the Roseleafs. And this kind of Munchausen-by-proxy had been blossoming for years—there’d been a girl in grade school Mabel had loved, a wrinkled, bald-headed child with a disease that aged her prematurely by decades. Progeria, another wonderful name, suggesting some island principality. Mabel had longed for a touch of progeria, only to be closer to that little girl who wore a beret crocheted with bluebirds and birdhouses.

LILY AND JORDAN TOOK THE MONTE
Carlo to Las Vegas after all, the old car making the ten-hour trip without incident. At a rest-stop tourist booth along the way, they’d picked up a brochure about Vegas weddings; as Jordan drove into town, Lily navigated from a map on the back of the brochure, directing them to the Marriage License Bureau—it was late, but the office stayed open until midnight. Both cranky from the long drive, Lily and Jordan stood in the crowded lobby of the bureau and filled out the papers with the golf pencils they’d been given. They were married just down the street, ten minutes later, in a five-minute ceremony.

In their motel that night, both exhausted, Lily lay in bed with the pillow balled up at the back of her neck to keep her wedding-day ringlets fresh. After the ceremony, she’d had her hair done in a salon in the El Cortez. Her wild ringlets were
still gathered up and speared with stems of baby’s breath. Unable to sleep, she flipped open and closed the lid to the antique ring Jordan had placed on her finger.

She sat up and turned on the light to watch Jordan asleep beside her. He lay entirely still, and Lily could touch the pulse point of his wrist, his bottom lip, his eyelash, without waking him. The skin of his arms and his cheeks had creases from the wrinkled sheets and pillowcase. When Jordan had first started spending nights with Lily, he’d been restless, sitting up late reading romance novels Lily’s mother had left behind. If he’d fallen asleep, anything would wake him—the click on of the refrigerator or a cricket on the windowsill. But after a few months of living among Lily and Mabel, he seemed to catch their habit for deep sleeping.

Lily had been studying how to read the bumps of people’s heads, and she ran her fingers over Jordan’s as he slept. She closed her eyes and saw herself as an old woman in an old dress, sitting deep in Jordan’s future in a shaded chair. She had a brief vision of Jordan patiently unknotting a knot in the lace of her boot.

Lily wouldn’t leave him after all, she decided. She was tempted to wake him up to tell him that—to tell him that she’d thought of leaving him, and that she’d changed her mind watching him sleep so soundly. It might worry him, might instill some proper fear, to know that his wife made important decisions in the middle of the night without him. The nights might not pass so peacefully for him then.

Lily lay back and closed her eyes and, to relax, promised
herself that she didn’t have to go any farther south. She’d send her mother a picture postcard of the feathery showgirls of Vegas. “We got this close,” Lily would write, with nothing else but her name.

I just don’t think it’s worth it
, Lily thought, then she said it softly, out loud, hoping to hear a certainty in her own voice. But her mouth was dry and her voice cracked and she sounded like a child. Lily touched at her hair, at the sprig of baby’s breath breaking to pieces. She wanted to call Mabel, to wake her in the night. Lily wouldn’t have to say anything.
Don’t tell me
, Mabel would say, scolding but concerned.
Let me guess
. It was what Mabel always said when Lily called crying over some boyfriend from a phone booth on the street corner or from a friend’s house in the middle of the night.
Don’t tell me, let me guess
. Lily closed her eyes and tried to sleep thinking of Mabel’s voice, running the words over and over through her mind.
Don’t tell me Don’t tell me Don’t tell me
.

Jordan spoke, startling Lily, and for a second she thought he might be talking in his sleep. His eyes closed, he said, “You’ve never been this far from home before, have you?”

“Neither have you,” Lily said.

“Yeah, I have.” He rolled over on his side and put his arm around Lily’s waist. “When Mom and Dad were trying to save their lousy marriage, when I was a kid, we took a family trip to stay in some bungalow on some beach in Virginia. There was a big storm and the windows broke. Dad cut the hell out of his hands cleaning up the glass. Things got better for a while, though, because me and Mom looked after him, bandaged
him up, poured him his Jack and Coke. Kept those cheap stogies of his lit.”

What the fuck do you know about anything
? Lily thought, tears in her eyes. You’ve had a beautiful life.

“I want a divorce,” she whispered, but he’d already fallen back to sleep or was pretending to sleep. If only he knew how to do something useful, like change the oil in a car. “I want a divorce,” she said again, crying but looking forward to returning home, when everything was over. She’d rent her own little place in town, hang up pictures torn from magazines, cook small meals on a tiny stove. She could go work with the secretaries at the grain office, the ladies addicted to Diet Coke and books on self-improvement. Lily fell asleep imagining slow hours of painting her nails dull colors, watching the clock, plotting a better life.

WHEN SHE WOKE
again a few hours later, Lily picked up her suitcase still packed and left Jordan in bed. It was still the middle of the night.
I’m not abandoning him
, she told herself. She just didn’t want her mother to see him yet, to see him scarred and scrawny, before Lily had had a chance to make any kind of impression. She hung the
DO NOT DISTURB/NO MOLESTE
sign on the doorknob, then walked across the quiet lot to the Monte Carlo. At least the car was running better now, she thought.

Driving alone through the dark, along a highway that wound around mountains and hills, frightened Lily, but the
terrible route distracted her from thoughts of her mother. When sunlight began to glow over the tops of the hills, when all she had left of the drive was the security of interstate, and when the radio began with its live, cheerful early-morning chatter, only then did Lily feel her stomach turning with nerves.

South of Tucson, the miles were marked off in kilometers, giving her only a vague sense of how long she’d been driving. Lily imagined her mother on this same stretch of highway leaving behind her children and her husband in his grave for the land of bandits and earthquakes and miles of bad road.

As she neared the border, she saw
SAINT ADELAIDE’S WINERY
—
NEXT EXIT
on a small billboard. She reached into her bag for the wine label her mother had sent weeks before;
PRODUCED AND BOTTLED BY SAINT ADELAIDE’S WINERY
it read in small print beneath a drawing of a mug shot of a terrifically mustached cowboy, a bullet hole in the upturned brim of his hat. Above him, it read
OUTLAW ROS£
. Lily held the label against her cheek, closed her eyes a second, and saw her mother and a man slow dancing knee-deep in crushed grape.

In her stomach and in her head, Lily felt that dizzy, dip-in-the-road nausea, and she drove onto the exit ramp with hesitation. For so long she’d been picturing her mother in her southwestern life, just a washed-out rendering, all seen as if looking through a piece of green glass. But with just one slight turn in the road, all the familiar images were thrown into confusion.

A dark purple variety of prickly pear was suddenly thick
along the road. She passed a beat-up bus parked at the side of the interstate, where a group of women prisoners in bright yellow jumpsuits cut brush with scythes. A guard stood nearby, the butt of a rifle resting against his hip. Up ahead was the whitewashed facade of Saint Adelaide’s, a bell in its short tower, and Lily became afraid again. Not for herself, really, but for her mother. A simple tap on the shoulder on an ordinary day, and you’re faced with your little girl nowhere she should be.

Lily pulled into the cul-de-sac of the winery and parked next to a dry, tiled fountain. Her ’do had collapsed from the wind of the drive, and she tried to repair it. She took from her purse a polyester scarf she’d bought from a souvenir shop
(STOLEN FROM MUSTANG RANCH
written across it), then put on some lipstick and clipped some sunshades onto her thick glasses. Lily licked her fingertips and adjusted a curl at her forehead. She looked a bit like a broke Vegas rat, and she liked it.

Impossible questions rolled through her mind too quickly to jot down.
Do you ever wake horrified in the middle of the night with worry for your children? Do you see us when you look in the mirror? Did you hate us for needing you
?