The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (16 page)

On the thick oak doors of the entryway was a
CLOSED/CERRADO
sign, above a listing of the hours. The tasting room would be open in a few minutes. Lily lit a cigarette and recalled a sexy border town in one of the first movies she ever saw. All the movies that played the Mazda were at least ten years old, some twenty, some thirty or forty, movies that were
cheap for the theater to rent. Many of them were troubled-youth movies of the 1950s and ’60s—girls in tight pedal pushers snapping their gum and hating all the people who had got anything from life. The movie Lily remembered starred Jack Lord, her dad’s favorite actor. A woman rode in Jack Lord’s convertible, and her long stringy hair blew all around. This small, skinny woman had terrified Lily, the way she’d first come on the screen, stepping around the junk of a gas station, lurking around the corners. The sting and rattle of the music or her slinkiness or maybe even the way she chewed her gum suggested something terrible to Lily. But she never did find out if the woman did anything to Jack Lord. Lily’s dad rested his arm at the back of her seat, and she leaned her head back and fell asleep. When she woke up, she was slung over her dad’s shoulder, the theater lobby upside down. Lily was scared for a second, thought she was falling, then relaxed. She put her fingers in the back belt loops of her dad’s jeans and pressed her cheek against the soft cotton of his shirt.

Lily brushed at her leg when she realized the coal of her cigarette had fallen and burned a hole in her dress.
This is close enough
, Lily thought, and she started the car and put it into reverse. She hit the gas and longed to drive in reverse all the way back to Nebraska. It would be satisfying to be the one to put the distance between herself and her mother, to watch the miles of road grow between them. But Lily slammed on the brakes when she heard a thump and caught sight of a motorcycle darting out of her way.

“I’m sorry,” Lily said, opening the car door. “Did I hit you?” The woman on the motorcycle wore a leather jacket and thin chains, a bandanna tied at her forehead.

“You couldn’t hit me if you tried,” the woman said. She smiled and turned off her bike. “I just pounded my fist against your trunk to startle you.”

Lily was fascinated by the woman’s long dirty braid with twigs caught in it.
Are you my mother’
? she thought, in the words of an old storybook she’d read in the school library, a book about a bird, knocked from its nest, questioning all the creatures it came across. But Lily knew this wasn’t her mother. Her mother had blue eyes and no birthmark on her neck.

“You been here before?” the woman said. “Me and some friends are camping out just down the road. The sisters bottle a great port. It’s like thirty bucks a pop but well worth it. The nuns do a swift business. They make money hand over fist, but not just at this. Margaret Bridget trades stock on the Internet.”

The doors were opened then by an old woman in stiff, new, bright blue jeans and a T-shirt embroidered with roses. A woman in a khaki skirt and plaid blouse pulled a large terracotta pot around to prop open the door, then sprayed the cactus in the pot with a mister. Lily had hoped for, at least, familiar nuns, women in white habits maybe speckled with the splash of red wine. The nuns gestured hello, and the motorcycle woman said she needed to buy a corkscrew. “Though I’ve opened bottles in the desert without a corkscrew
before,” she said, mostly to Lily. “You wrap the bottle tight in a towel and slam it against a rock . . . pushes the cork out good enough to get at.”

Lily stepped into the tasting room and up to a row of oak barrels and wrought iron stools. It was too dark inside to see with the sunshades, so Lily took them from her glasses and paid two dollars for the tasting. The wines listed on the chalkboard had cutesy, desert-theme names, like “Roadrunner Riesling” and “Wild Coyote Chardonnay.” She could use a drink, awfully, even something as slight as cartoony tourist wine. But, “Anyone under twenty-one,” the nun said, singsong, “can only taste our non-alcoholics.”

Lily didn’t argue or present her fake ID. She just nodded and tapped her knuckle on the barrel top. She couldn’t stomach the thought of even the most meaningless lie. It will be all gut-wrenching truth from here on out, she declared to herself. She’d demand confession and clarity, a nearly unhealthy honesty, from everyone in her life, even passing strangers. She wanted the truth right now from the nuns and the motorcycle woman, wanted to hear their every dirty thought and secret unspoken cruelty.

As the motorcycle woman paid for her little bottle of port, Lily took her mother’s recent photograph from her purse. “Have you seen this woman?” she said, a line she’d heard in movies hundreds of times but had never before had the chance to say.

“Of course,” the nun said, though the photo was a bit out of focus. “It’s Fiona.”

Say it again
, Lily wanted to say.

“You’re her daughter,” the motorcycle woman said so suddenly, so sharply, it sounded like an accusation.

“What?” Lily said, but all three women were staring at her, unsmiling, studying her face. They were looking for her mother, or the lack of her mother, in her features and her gestures. Lily felt blood running from her nose, flowing to her lip.

“Oh, sweetheart,” the motorcycle woman said, pulling a handkerchief from her back pocket. Lily thought only her sister carried handkerchiefs. Mabel had collected many of them from within the antique shop and had laundered them and kept them in the top drawer of her vanity with pillows of cinnamon sachet. They made Mabel sneeze when she held them to her nose.

Lily licked some of the blood from her lip and felt the blood thick in her throat. The motorcycle woman held the hanky to Lily’s face with one hand and held the back of her head with the other, as if administering chloroform.

“Let me go get your mother,” one nun said. “She’s just in the back.”

“No,” Lily said and asked for a restroom. In the restroom around a corner, at the sink, she took her glasses off and set them in an empty soap dish. She leaned her head back and pinched the bridge of her nose, the way the school nurse had once advised her after a fistfight with a pansy-ass girl hitter. The bleeding stopped after a minute or two, and Lily washed the blood from her face and took off the headscarf. She undid
the pins of her hair and shook some of the curls out a bit, letting her hair fall to her shoulders. Her left nostril was now dark and swollen with clotted blood.

“Your mother’s going to love seeing you,” the nun said when Lily stepped from the bathroom. All the women were smiling with lots of teeth, trying to look like they didn’t notice her warmed-over-deathness.

The nun in the skirt put her arm through Lily’s and led her toward a door in the back of the tasting room. They walked outside to a small shed near the rows of circling vine. Lily felt queasy from the sun suddenly in her eyes, and she thought a public vomiting would be just the thing to follow a nosebleed. She bit her lip and pinched the skin of her arm to distract her from her stomachache.

Inside the shed, she saw her mother’s shadow cast by the heavy sunlight in the room. Her mother was hidden by bamboo racks covered with bunches of grapes laid out to dry. Lily caught a glimpse of her gloved hand, a glint of light on a garden shear, the collar of her denim shirt. Something very pretty played on the radio, a song in Spanish. “Fiona,” the nun said, taking her arm from Lily’s and turning back toward the door to leave. Lily wanted the nun to stay, to introduce them, to talk with them, to rub Lily’s back, to stroke her hair, to hold her hand.

Lily hadn’t been certain what to expect; her mother had sent photos over the years, but she was always blurry in them and poorly lit. She’d once sent a faulty Polaroid that hadn’t
developed; it had arrived still a chemical swirl of blue and purple and green—she apparently hadn’t even waited for the picture to develop before dropping it into the envelope.

Her mother stepped from around the corner of the racks, a not-old woman, but a woman far from the lost young thing Lily had been picturing for years. Like the motorcycle woman, she wore her dark hair pulled back in a long braid, loose strands framing her face. “Yes, dear?” she said, her head tilted.

In that “Yes, dear?” Lily heard a pang of hope, a little expectation, something that suggested that her mother wanted this young woman standing before her to be someone belonging to her.

“I’m Lily,” Lily said. Then, “Lily Rollow.”

Her mother’s smile dropped, her chin quivered, then her smile came back again. “Lily,” she said. “Oh, Lily,” she said. “Of course, you’re Lily. I’d know you anywhere. How could I not? You look just like him. You look exactly like your father.” She dissolved into tears then, there, across the room. She held one gloved hand to her face, the other at her hip, and she cried alone. Lily kept her distance, somehow comforted by the lack of her mother’s welcoming embrace or kiss on the cheek. Who else in the world would she greet like this? she thought, watching her mother come apart. Nobody else, she thought. Just me and my sister.

“I’m sorry,” her mother said, wiping her tears with a towel she’d had tucked into the waist of her chinos. “You just look so much like your father.” Lily didn’t say anything about how
she didn’t look anything at all like her father and that of course she’d recognize her because they’d been sending school pictures for years.

“So where’s Madeline?” Fiona said. “Didn’t Madeline come?” It took Lily a second to remember that Madeline was Mabel’s real name.

“She didn’t come. And she goes by Mabel now,” she said, feeling possessive of her sister’s choices.

“Oh, yes,” she said. She rolled her eyes and put her hands on her hips in a motherly gesture stolen from a sitcom, like
Oh, yes. Oh, how well I know that wacky Madeline
. “The name I gave her wasn’t good enough.”

When her mother looked at her again, she furrowed her brow and squinted. “Lily, your nose is bleeding,” she said, just as Lily felt the blood wet again at her lip.

“Oh,
fuck
,” Lily said.

“Don’t say that word,” her mother said, coming to her with the towel. Lily didn’t mind the gentle scolding.
What else
? she wanted to say.
What other words don’t you want to hear
”?

After putting the towel in Lily’s hand and moving Lily’s hand to hold the towel to her nose, Fiona touched her cheek. Lily felt the many rings on her fingers and the rough skin of her hands. Fiona pushed the hair from Lily’s forehead and pressed her palm there like feeling for a fever. She then stepped back and took a whole look, and Lily felt too fat standing there in front of her mother who shared Mabel’s frailty.

Fiona pointed at the new burn hole in Lily’s dress. “You
smoke cigarettes,” she said. “I wish you girls wouldn’t smoke. You know, other people can smell it, the smoke, really strongly, on you. You don’t really know that when you’re a smoker. And, I mean, I don’t mean to be critical, it’s just that I used to be a heavy smoker too, not so long ago, so I know a little something about it. You know, while you’re here, over in Nogales, you should get some of that nicotine gum or nicotine patches or something. Everything like that’s real cheap down here. Any prescription, really. I don’t know if you, you know, if you have medicines that you . . .”

“No,” Lily said.

“That’s good,” her mother said, sighing with what sounded like great relief. They stood not speaking for a moment. Lily was terrified that her mother might suggest cheap diet pills, some black market concoction unavailable in the United States. “Anyway, I’ve been expecting you, really,” Fiona said. “I wished it, really. Thought you two might have come looking for your mother some time ago.”

Lily only smiled politely, but her mother kept looking at her, nodding, seemingly waiting for some excuse. Lily thought of what Mabel had said the night Lily told her she was going to Mexico.
What were we supposed to do
? Mabel had said.
Crawl across the desert with our little plastic suitcases
? It infuriated Lily, this idea that she and Mabel were somehow, in any way, responsible for the many years apart from their mother.
You stink like smoke
, her mother says.
What drugs do you take? Why didn’t you come sooner
? “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?” Lily found herself saying. “You expected
us some years ago? We were supposed to come for
you
? That doesn’t seem at all backwards to you?”

Fiona held one hand at her own throat with worry. “Please watch your language, Lily, or . . .” Fiona started, but didn’t finish.

“
Or
? Or what? What? ’Or I’ll ask you to leave’?” Lily said. “Could that have possibly been what you were about to say to me? Were you going to ask me to leave? Was my ffff . . .” She stopped herself, but started again, “ffffucking whore of a . . . of a piece-of-shit . . . cunt mother going to ask me to fucking leave?”

Her mother’s entire lack of response, the way she didn’t even take her eyes away from Lily, as if she’d long been prepared for Lily to be crude and foul and insulting, made her feel sick to her stomach again. Lily held the blood-spotted towel up to cover her face. I’m so fucked-up, she thought. Lily wished to be felled by a sudden crying jag, but she was much too exhausted.

“Lily,” her mother said, softly. She held her hands gently at Lily’s elbows. “Lily, listen to me,” but she didn’t say anything else. After a long moment, Fiona took the towel from Lily and cleaned up Lily’s face. “We haven’t been together five minutes, and there’s already been tears and blood.”

“This isn’t me,” Lily said. “I don’t know why I’m being like this. I didn’t come all this way to call you terrible names.” How, Lily wondered, on God’s green earth, do you apologize to your mother for calling her a piece-of-shit cunt? “I mean, back at home, I’m constantly the one who defends you to
Mabel. We have these fights about . . . about how you must feel and about how things must have been for you. Where you’re concerned, I’ve always been, you know, understanding.” She felt guilty for speaking poorly of Mabel, but just now it felt like a gesture of kindness to her mother.