The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (18 page)

Mabel felt the scratch of chapped lips at her ear.
Everything’s ruined
, she heard in the
glug-glug
of a voice underwater. Though Mabel knew her house had not been in the path of the tornado, she began to see things from the shop in the road and the ditches, things she kept locked in a fire-safe box along with the fake suicide note—a necklace of military dog tags her father had once ordered from an ad in a comic book; the press-on nails her mother wore on her honeymoon; the missing glass ruby from an earring Jordan had given Lily.
Mabel felt completely lost, like she’d never find her way home.

She could hardly breathe the damp air in the truck, and she had a headache from the too-strong coffee and from the shrill whistle of the rain getting in through the cracked back window. Mabel pulled at the T-shirt tight at her throat, and she felt Callie’s angel wing brush the back of her neck. She felt Callie’s soaked strands of hair against her cheek. If the ghost were real, Mabel would’ve grabbed it by the ankle for them all to see the dead thing Callie had become.
They still wouldn’t believe it
, Callie glug-glugged in Mabel’s ear,
even if they saw it
.

Callie took Mabel by the scruff of the neck and carried her up so she could look down upon herself crammed into the truck. If they hit a deer and went rolling, not even the jaws of life would be able to pry them all apart. The Roseleafs were too at ease with Mabel’s lie and with her presence—the truth would be much too unsettling for them. To tell them the truth now, she thought, would be too absolutely cruel. She’d lie to them and lie to them until she was dead, if it meant saving them another minute of despair.

Roughed around by the bumpy ride, Mabel became more pinned in, one arm behind her back, the other behind Wyatt’s, her legs under Jesse’s. She couldn’t move an inch and had to gasp, practically, for air. Mabel had first developed claustrophobia years before when she’d dared Lily to crawl into the trunk of a junked car on the farm. The girls, each
with a BB gun, had been shooting out the car’s windows and, with almost all the glass in pieces, they became bored. Lily, of course, accepted the dare. Though the trunk did not close all the way, though Lily got plenty of air and sunlight and had plenty of room in the spacious trunk, Mabel had passed out in the open air and wind of the field.

Wyatt drove into Stitch Farm, past the parking lot, splashing mud and tearing up footpaths. The gates to the lean-to had already been opened, and a crowd had gathered at the back of Mr. Stitch’s pickup. When Wyatt hit the brakes, poor dead Callie fell forward, through the windshield, and smack down, face first on the hood of the truck. Seeing the bottoms of her tiny wrinkled feet, pink babyish feet strangely untouched by decay, Mabel pitied Callie and wished she’d been able to make her pretty for the crowd. Mabel could have put a French braid in her thinning hair and rubbed some lipstick into her skin to pinken her cheeks.

“I only wanted some quiet evenings in your house,” Mabel said as Wyatt helped her from the truck, out into the rain, her legs still sleepy and numb from the tight ride. “A cocktail and a movie, a haircut on Sunday.” Mabel worried that Callie would now haunt her every minute spent in the Roseleaf house, would possibly even drown her in the empty pool as she slept.

“What are you talking about?” Wyatt said, holding Mabel tight by the arms. “You’ll spend lots of time in our house. You’re part of our life now.”

“No,” Mabel said, and she leaned in close to Wyatt’s ear.
“I’m not part of anything. I lied about having your sister’s eye, and you fell for it, that’s all. That’s all it was. That’s all I’m part of.” Mabel even stood back to chuckle about it, so he’d think she was sick.

Wyatt dropped his hands from her arms. He just stood there in the rain, his teeth chattering, waiting for her to take it all back. Then, “Shhh,” he said, though Mabel had only been whispering. “Hush, now,” and he pushed her wet hair back hard from her face. “You’re lying. You’re just trying to get out of going up to Brandi.” He shrugged his shoulders. “You’re just telling a little fucking lie.”

“I’m not lying,” Mabel said. “I mean . . . I mean, I am lying, but . . .” Mabel looked out, hoping to see Callie wuthering above the black umbrellas of the crowd, hoping she’d swoop down to whisper truth in Wyatt’s ear.

“Shhh,” he said, holding her arms tight again and looking at his brothers and his father waiting at the edge of the crowd. “You just don’t want her to touch your eye,” he said. Wyatt took Mabel by the elbow. He pushed through the crowd, dragging her to the back of the Stitch pickup, where Brandi sat in her wheelchair. Brandi wore a plastic slicker, see-through over her ratty cashmere suit. Her newly done-up curls were tucked inside a clear hat. Mr. Stitch stood next to her wearing a red and white rain poncho meant for watching college football games. The hood was big enough to cover his entire cowboy hat. Though a few boys held umbrellas above them both, they all got pretty well sopping.

Mr. Stitch took a cameo brooch held up to him by a young
woman, and he pressed it into Brandi’s hand. He leaned over, putting his ear to Brandi’s mouth. “Mums,” Mr. Stitch said that she said. “Mums.”

“Oh, dear, yes,” the young woman said, taking back the brooch. “Oh, yes. We planted mums next to the grave.”

“She must like them,” Mr. Stitch said, and the woman nodded and thanked him.

Wyatt shoved Mabel up to the edge of the tailgate, and she saw that Brandi’s hand bled from a pricking of the pin of the cameo. “She’s the one with the eye,” Wyatt told Mr. Stitch, before stepping back. Mabel wondered if there’d been others—the one with the liver, the one with the kidneys. She wondered if she was just the next in a long line of women claiming to have Callie’s parts.
Feel her heart beating in my chest
, they may have said, or, stretching out a long leg,
Her marrow’s in my hones
, because the Roseleaf boys were so handsome and sad and distant.

Mabel took Brandi’s hand and squeezed it, hoping for her to squeeze back, but her grip remained limp. Mabel squeezed harder, but nothing. Brandi only blinked the rain from her lashes. Mabel saw goose pimples across the skin of Brandi’s bare legs, and she noticed how long her legs were, how tall she’d be if she stood.

As the rain fell heavier and the wind blew, Brandi’s teeth began to rattle. Mr. Stitch put his ear to her lips. “What do you say, darling?” he said, shouting for the benefit of the crowd. “What do you see?”

“She wants you to tell them all the truth,” Mabel said, almost convincing herself that the words in her head, the thoughts, belonged to Brandi. She tried to feel some sign of strength in Brandi’s hand, some unspoken message in a touch returned. “She wants you to tell them that she doesn’t speak to the dead. She doesn’t know anything about the dead.” There wasn’t an ounce of determination in Brandi’s face, the face of someone dumb to everyone dead and alive. But Mabel suspected that her own sudden and deep hatred of Mr. Stitch was actually Brandi’s. “She wants you to tell them to quit coming to her. Tell them to go home and to stay home and to leave her the fuck alone.” Mabel felt a twitch in Brandi’s finger then, and she reached up and pulled on Brandi’s elbow, intending to take her from her chair, to catch her in her arms and carry her far away to someplace dry and warm. But Brandi was heavy, her useless legs awkward, and Mabel lost her balance, dropping them both into the mud.

Mr. Stitch took a whistle from his pocket, and he blew on it, his face red, the whistle sputtering, and some broad-shouldered young men came running. Three of the men gently lifted Brandi and passed her up to two others next to the wheelchair. Mabel lay on the ground and watched it happen slowly above her—mud rolling with the rain off the plastic slicker, Brandi’s unnecessarily orthopedic shoe slipping off her heel, a run sudden in her stocking.

Wyatt was suddenly at Mabel’s side, helping her up from the ground. “We gotta get you out of here,” he said, “before
the mob tears you apart.” Mabel slapped Wyatt’s hands away and ran toward the open, empty field. She kept running, even after she’d run far away, even after it had stopped raining. A few miles from Stitch Farm, Mabel looked back and saw nothing but cornfields and fields of beans and sorghum. A clumsy locust flew fast into Mabel’s shoulder and dropped to the road. It landed on its wings and kicked its legs.
Come back
, it chirped, and Mabel realized it was Callie.
We’ll have slumber parties. We’ll tell ghost stories
.

Mabel remembered then how tired she was and how hungry, and she promised herself she’d stop seeing Callie, and hearing her, once she’d had some rest and a bite to eat. She kicked the felled locust into the ditch and walked farther, until she came upon a field of sunflowers. The flowers were tall and burned from the sun, the heads bowed and heavy with seed. Mabel picked out the seeds of one and ate them one by one from her palm, sitting in the thin shade of the field.

When Mabel woke up some hours later on the ground beneath the sunflowers, it was dark, and she could hear the cattle of the meat research facility lowing in their pens. A train passed somewhere nearby, and the ground gently shook with every crack of the rail. Mabel got back on the road and found a bottle, which she broke against a post to form a jagged edge. Normally she wasn’t afraid of the empty spaces of a country night, but tonight the dark seemed suspect. On an odd night like this one, the thoughts of even the kindliest farmer could turn toward molestation upon coming across a lone girl in the middle of nowhere.

Mabel cut across the empty fields, passing all the old barns that leaned toward the ground just a few strong gusts from collapse. She slapped at the grasshoppers sticking to her legs. When she saw the old shot-up sign for the antique shop,
ANTIQUES
2
MI.
, and the red arrow pointing, Mabel began to run again, though she could hardly lift her feet, she was so tired.

From the end of her driveway, Mabel heard the phone ringing. She thought it might be Lily. I
had a bad feeling
, Lily would say when Mabel answered. But on the phone was a woman offering free dance lessons. “Learn to swing, to tango, to cha-cha-cha; learn hundreds of waltzes, from the Tennessee to the Viennese, learn a country two-step, even a Russian tarantella,” all delivered with a genuine flair of enthusiasm. After hanging up on the woman, Mabel worried about not knowing even a single waltz. It was almost as if, in her tired legs, she could feel this absence of knowledge.

Mabel looked across the shop. She could feel the weight of every last little piece of junk. She covered her mouth to keep from breathing in the fog of dust clouding the room. Her clothes caked with dry mud, she sat on the floor and brought her knees in to her chest. Mabel heard the house cracking and popping its joints
(It’s just the house settling
, her grandmother had always said), and she felt all the house’s age and effort in her own elbows and knees.

On the radio, the reporter had described people setting fire to the feeble remains of their homes after the tornadoes. The people picked through the wreckage for everything sentimental,
then let the walls and rafters turn to smoke. Mabel thought about dropping a match on everything around her. How else could she find her rightful place, while this place still stood?

Mabel wondered if the Roseleafs would find it easier to forgive her if she lost everything in a fire. She’d tell them about the original Kewpie that, had its belly not been broken in and the point of its head not chipped off, would’ve been worth a fortune. And the few broken stained glass pieces, kept in a fishbowl, of a Tiffany window that had once adorned a mausoleum in the famous Woodlawn National Cemetery of New York. When you held one piece up to the light, Mabel would tell them, you could see the red blossom of a tree. Mabel could inventory the loss for the Roseleafs—the lace-up boot of a woman who’d almost taken the
Titanic
, the long curling string snapped from Leadbelly’s guitar—so they would understand the near worth of the place. Mabel needed them to worry about her.

Sitting on the floor, Mabel noticed a tiny figure beneath the corner of a rug—the little Swiss girl that Lily had broken from the wheel of a clock when they were little girls. Mabel put the wooden piece in her own mouth, just like Lily had done, rolling it around on her tongue, knocking it against her teeth. This tiny figure would be the one thing she’d keep, Mabel decided. She’d keep it for years, then drop it into Lily’s casket should she die first.

Mabel stood and grabbed a red Formica chair and threw it
out the front door, and watched as it bounced a few times down the front walk. She put a brick in front of the screen door to keep it open, then grabbed a box full of matchless shoes and spilled them all out onto the porch. She flung record albums spinning out the window. She grabbed one end of a sofa and pulled it from the house, its legs screeching against the wood floor. Mabel stumbled on the shoes on the porch, but after much struggle she got the sofa out on the lawn.

Enough, Mabel thought, feeling exhausted again. She sat on the sofa and looked up at the moon. Mabel decided she’d give herself a few days to get everything out of the front room. Then she’d begin to turn the place into a respectable shop without clutter or dust. For too long, there’d been too much; if you touched one thing, a whole wall of junk would come tumbling down. She remembered a shop she’d visited in Lincoln, where the proprietor, an old woman smelling of violets, served tea in chipped cups and tricked you with a dish of glass candy. Everything had its own place on a shelf. With thin pieces of string, the woman had tied yellow price tags to everything, and there were no negotiations. Everything was as is.

Mabel smelled smoke and ash and looked up to catch sight of herself tossing something aflame from her bedroom window. It was paper burning, and it spun and floated like a slow Chinese firework toward the ditch of dry grass, where the flame would build and gain force. Though the paper burned, Mabel could read it as it drifted past her vision, could
read every bit of the suicide note her mother had written for her father, every old lie and wrong word red and hot.