The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (19 page)

She curled up on the sofa on the lawn to sleep a minute and dreamed of swimming in the burning house, grabbing at the antiques that floated away and out of reach.

WHEN LILY WOKE, THE FRONT ROOM
of her mother’s house smelled of burned twigs. A peach sat on the windowsill near the sofa, and beneath it a slip of paper. Lily bit into the fruit, then licked at the juice that ran down her wrist.
Dear Lily
, the note read. A
peach, and there’s more in the kitchen closet. I’ve gone to the vineyard
—and nothing more, not even a “Love, your mother.”

As Lily soaked in the tub, she held a sliver of pink soap in her palm, sniffed at its lilac perfume. Earlier, she’d noticed the lipstick on the coffee cup in the kitchen sink and the imprint of her mother’s teeth on a triangle of wheat toast. She was determined to learn something significant from these fragments, to bring home to Mabel a useful impression of their mother.

As she unknotted the rats in her hair with her mother’s comb, a young pregnant woman stepped into the bathroom.
“Lily,” the woman said. Her gauzy white blouse was draped in layers across her wide belly, and she wore pink pants.

“I’m Ana,” she said. “Fiona’s stepdaughter. Or near stepdaughter. She only lived with my dad for a while. They were never married.” With the smooth lilt of Ana’s accent, Lily suspected she’d been the one her mother had called the night before, the one to whom she’d spoken Spanish. This Ana had been in the picture with Fiona and the ocean.

“My mother’s not here,” Lily said, proprietary, stressing the
my
. This possessiveness—it was something stepsisters did to each other, Lily imagined.

“I’m here for
you
,” Ana said, taking a chenille robe from a hook on the door. She held the robe open for Lily. Though Ana looked to be Lily’s age, she seemed years older, and Lily felt too embarrassed to request privacy. Ana would likely be the type of woman to scoff at modesty, so Lily stood from the tub and put her arms through the sleeves.

“My mother sent you?”

“No,” Ana said. She took a tissue from her purse and held it to Lily’s chin. Lily spit out the peach pit she’d been distractedly rolling around in her mouth all morning. “Fiona said you were here, and I had a feeling you’d be left alone.” Ana sniffed the burned-smelling air. “She’s been burning sage,” Ana said. “She burns sticks of sage and smokes the place out. To ward off something or other.” Ana rolled her eyes.

Lily dressed as Ana hurriedly and fiercely scrubbed at the dishes in the sink. Lily’s mother had written of new fiancés over the years but never new daughters. She hoped there
were not others; she didn’t want to have to imagine Fiona mothering hordes of other people’s children.

They drove the short drive to Nogales in Ana’s Chevy Nova, a dashboard hula girl swishing wildly with the bumps in the road. Ana played a tape of a girl Lily had never heard of before. “Sugar Pie DeSanto,” Ana explained. “It was only the sixties, and already she wasn’t taking no shit off anybody.” They rocked in their seats to a song called “Do I Make Myself Clear?” and shared a cigarette. “I’m not inhaling deep,” Ana said, and she pointed her thumb to her gut. “The boss don’t smoke.”

Ana tugged at the collar of her blouse, as if she wanted Lily to be sure to notice the bruise. Once, Lily, drunk, fell in the street and broke her glasses—she got a black eye and lived it up, Mabel bringing her shots of Maker’s Mark for the pain while she nursed the bruise with a rib eye. Lily wore her clip-on sunshades indoors and out until the bruise faded, all the while enjoying all the quick half glances she got and the behind-the-hand whispers. She’d tell people the truth, like she was telling a lie: I
just fell in the street
, with a mumble, and a crack in her voice. Where did Mabel and I get our sense of drama? Lily wondered. Their mother clearly hoped for her own grief to go entirely unnoticed.

As Lily and Ana stepped onto the crowded sidewalks of Nogales, a small pack of children tugged at their sleeves. They begged them to buy one of the maracas in the trays slung around their necks. Lily accidentally stumbled into them, tipping over a one-armed boy, sending his maracas
spinning and rattling into a gutter. Ana quickly righted the boy before he’d even realized he’d fallen, speaking in Spanish and pressing dollar bills into the boy’s one palm to stop any fuss. She then linked her arm through Lily’s, fanning her with a paper fan patterned with various sumo-wrestling moves. Her eyes closed, Lily lifted her chin to feel the slightly cool push of air against her neck.

“I feel fine,” Lily said, though she felt sick from the press of the desert heat. She longed for her own bed and for Mabel’s worthless stomach-flu remedies.

Women in braids and housedresses cluttered the sidewalks with souvenirs for sale—ceramic lizards painted in tropical colors, tall bottles of clear vanilla, faceless rag dolls with
MEXICO
sewn into their skirts. Shopkeeps dragged out piles of blankets that looked scratchy. Terra-cotta suns hung alongside hanging pots spilling out clay fish. The shops sold crescent moons made of frosted glass and chess sets made of rock. Skeleton brides and grooms hung slack jawed from puppet strings.

Lily saw an old movie poster she wanted to buy for Mabel—
UN GATO SOBRE EL TEJADO CALIENTE
, with an illustration of Elizabeth Taylor in a baby-blue slip sitting on an iron bed.
ESTA ES MAGGIE LA GATA
. But when she asked Ana, who had firm hold of her arm, to slow down, Ana couldn’t hear her weak voice above the racket of the street. Ana only smiled and said, “Just let me know if you want to stop for anything.”

Lily touched Ana’s stomach without her seeming to notice. She became determined to coax Ana back to
Nebraska with her, where they would all raise the little one together. Lily would be saving Ana, and possibly the child, from abuse, in a way that Lily’s mother seemed unable to do. Ana
had
to come with her. There were no other meaningful conclusions.

They walked up to a man who carried a row of counterfeit Gucci handbags on a broomstick at his shoulder. “Medical prescriptions?” the man whispered in Lily’s ear, his breath smelling sweetly of clove. “Xanax, Valium?” Ana stepped in to negotiate for a new purse. Mabel would love Nogales, Lily thought—all the bartering, all the cheap goods she could make a fortune off back home in the shop.

Ana, with two handbags on her arm, led Lily to a window in a bright blue wall. She bought them both fish tacos from the walk-up café then led them to a bench in an open space. As they ate the tacos, they watched children practice drums in a schoolyard.

“Are you having a boy or girl, do you think?” Lily said.

“A boy,” Ana said. “And don’t I know it. The little squirt’s been hell on wheels.” She gave her stomach an annoyed finger thump.

“You’ll be glad to let him out.”

“I guess so,” Ana said. “But I kind of like him right where he is, truth be known.”

“Where’d you get that bruise?” Lily said, feeling a little bold.

“Bruise?” Ana said. She said it like she didn’t know what Lily was talking about, but she’d reached right up to the purple
spot near her throat. “Oh, this bruise,” she said, after a second. “Danny and me, we get to wrestling around. Just horsing around and making out. Just him being cute, and I bruise easily.” Ana pressed lightly on the bruise, seeming pleased with it, maybe picturing the romantic rough-and-tumble she described.

It pissed Lily off that Ana, who clearly had some fierce bones in her body, would fall patsy to some guy. “If I was pregnant,” Lily said, “I’d protect my baby with my life.”

Ana had been leaning in toward Lily, and now she leaned away. “Is that so,” Ana muttered, looking off, shutting down. She buttoned her blouse up more, hiding her bruise away.

“Leave the bastard,” Lily said, wanting to be the tough stepsister, in town only a minute, who suggested things no one else would. Now Lily wished she’d brought Jordan along, for everyone to envy her her gentle husband. “My sister and me, we have a house, a shop. Come to Nebraska with me.”

Ana only shrugged. “Fiona’s right about you.”

“What do you mean? What is she right about?”

“Nothing,” Ana said, keeping it secret. Lily actually relaxed, happy that her mother had formed an opinion of her and had confided it to her closest friend.

“I can give you my address,” Lily said. “And you could come anytime. You should do something. Get a gun or something at least.”

“Are you crazy?” Ana said. She took out her paper fan again but kept the breeze to herself. Lily leaned over a bit for
some of the cooler air. “I’m surprised you’d suggest a gun,” Ana said, not looking at Lily. “Your father’s suicide and all.”

“My mom told you about that?”

Ana shut the fan and dropped it into her lap. She looked at Lily. “She told me things she didn’t even tell you.”

“What are you talking about?” Lily said.

Ana busied herself with her new purse, concentrating on adjusting the strap. Her hands shook as she fumbled with a tiny buckle. What she said then, she said so softly Lily couldn’t hear her. Lily asked Ana to say it again. Ana said, loud enough, but without looking at Lily, “He shot himself in front of her. Your father shot himself right in front of your mother.”

“Oh, God,” Lily said, losing her breath a second. She’d never had to picture any of it before; no one had ever breathed a word of such violence. In Lily’s childish imaginings, the bullet had slipped from the gun down her father’s throat like a fatal dose. Lily had never heard who found him or how they’d found him. Now all the parts of the room, long since forgotten, the rust-stained wallpaper, the houseflies thick in summer, a dusty seashell, and a jar of wheat pennies all surrounded her father in his evening chair. How closely had her mother stood, and how closely had she seen?
Come back
, had he said,
or I swear I’ll do
it?

“She lied to you,” Lily said. “My father would never do that to her.”

“She couldn’t have been lying to me,” Ana said. “Not the way she told it. And Fiona doesn’t lie.”

“But Fiona always lies,” Lily said. “All she does is lie.” Lily noticed new things about Ana then, like a patch of broken blood vessels on her neck and a fresh scar at the corner of her eye. The piercing of her ear was torn clear through the lobe.

Ana stood and tossed her taco wrapper into a trash can, then walked toward another street of merchants. Lily still felt dazed from thoughts of her father’s sad act of cruelty. She was still back in that room with her father’s work boots kicked off by the door, the laces still in knots.

Lily didn’t follow Ana. She stood from the bench and slipped into a dark, corner shop silent but for the water running in the fountains for sale. The air in the room was cool and damp, nearly misty. Lily walked past a collection of porcelain sink basins on the floor, the insides painted with flowers and fish and cherubs. After stopping at a wall of tile-framed mirrors, she noticed the dirt in the creases of her face. She took a pack of Kleenex from her purse, licked a tissue, cleaned up a little. Her father, one night, wiped hard at the corn dust, at the red chaff and dirt on her face and neck, enraged at her for playing in the bin. “Children suffocate,” he said.

It had been a poker night on somebody’s farm, and the grown-ups listened to the old Redd Foxx records the children weren’t allowed to hear. Shooed out into the dark for a game of “Ghostie, Ghostie, Come Out Tonight,” a boy led the five or so children to the mostly empty corn bin, and he opened the door and removed some of the top panels that kept the corn in. They all stripped and dropped naked into the chest-high
pile of shelled kernels. A bird, caught at the top, fluttered its wings against the dark bin walls towering above them. The children, barely lit by a touch of moonlight, walked around like zombies, silent and slow in the thick corn dust. Lily had held her hands close to her chest and burrowed, loving the silkiness of the corn against her skin as it parted and engulfed her.

Lily saw, in the mirror, a girl sitting on the floor of the shop. The girl, her tray of maracas beside her, ate pieces of candied fruit from a paper napkin unfolded in her lap. She offered Lily a piece of sugary mango. As Lily sat on a bench to eat it, she thought of her father that night holding her tight as he scrubbed the chaff away with a dry towel. “I’m not mad,” he’d said, very mad, picturing his babies not breathing.

In the corner of the shop, a tall screen painted with red parrots hid a desk. Lily could see a woman’s sandaled foot and a curl of adding-machine tape inching down the side of the desk. “Hello?” Lily said, and the woman peeked around.

“Yes?” she said. “Can I help you with something?”

“Where could I find a ride?” Lily asked. “I need to go to Saint Adelaide’s,” then she added, “to see the nuns,” then, “I’ve left my husband.” When the woman still seemed unmoved, Lily lied just a little more. “And I’m pregnant.”

The woman then nodded slowly and disappeared again behind the screen. She shouted something in Spanish, her words echoing up a stairwell. She stepped out with her keys. “When my son comes down to watch the shop,” the woman said, “I’ll drive you up there myself.”

“Thank you,” Lily said, touched by the woman’s gullibility. At Saint Adelaide’s, she’d get into the Monte Carlo and vanish from the desert.
She just ran away?
her mother might ask Ana, puzzled by her mysterious daughter. Lily took from her purse the Kleenex with the peach pit from the piece of fruit her mother had left her for breakfast. She’d leave the pit on the dash of her mother’s car. Though Lily did feel sympathy for her mother, and what her mother had had to see, nothing had really changed; her mother had still left them in a house full of junk. None of this was very complicated, Lily promised herself.

WHEN MABEL WOKE, STILL ON THE SOFA
on the lawn in front of the house, she found that someone had covered her with a thin bathrobe. The robe was patterned with stars and crescent moons and had been food for moths for years as it hung on a coat hook. Mabel’s eye caught on a bicycle dropped near the porch, a wheel slowly spinning to a stop. She noticed a crumb of something on the porch step.