Wallflowers (2 page)

“Faster.”

“Good night, Mr. Bradley. Happy St. Patrick’s Day.”

In the troposphere, the clouds drop sacs of water too heavy for the sky. They streak to earth and fill the storm drains, flowerpots, blue plastic pools. The rain spills down the runnel of the road, the pavement worn by all-season tires, roller blades, the cloven hoofs of mule deer. The water searches for hold in ground softer than cement, in the mossy ditches, and farther, the woods, in hot sinks of soil where thousands of eyeless creatures rise to sip at the roots of trees. Here, the Copper River dunks the cow parsnip over their heads, and takes the skunk cabbages too. The birch trunks wade in to their shins.

In the morning, the girl wakes to the tick of Ms. Bradley’s heels down the flagstones. Rain drums the roof, fills the window boxes; the trailing geraniums haven’t got a hope in hell. Ms. Bradley’s car barks to life. The windshield wipers hum on. The girl hears them from her pillow.        

On the other side of the wall, across the driveway, over the cedar shrubs, her mother stands in their kitchen and boils water for coffee. She toasts a crumpet in her convection oven. She pours orange juice into last night’s brandy snifter. She swirls the liquid and warms the glass between her palms. She will be glad when Ms. Feliz returns, so her daughter will watch
Wife Swap
with her again, or televised ballroom dance competitions on PBS. Her sister married last year, and she and her daughter wore matching mint dresses. She imagines that they will wear these dresses as they watch ballroom dance. They will say words like
floorcraft
and know the difference between a rumba and a bolero.

Last week, she collected twenty kilograms of stones and emptied them into her bathtub. They will remain there until the rain stops, when she will lay them on a towel to sun-dry. Perhaps it’s best her daughter lives next door, where she may use the shower. For herself, she rinses her armpits with a cloth. She sprays body mist. Now and then, she showers at the gym. Every night she visits the gym, she sees Miranda Bradley on the cross-trainer in bone-pinching Lycra. Miranda Bradley squeezing ninety pounds on the abductor-adductor machine. Miranda Bradley hinged by her hip blades in full locust pose over a Swiss ball. When Miranda Bradley enters the change room at the same time as her, the girl’s mother waits for a private stall.

Now she sips brandy-laced orange juice and plunges the coffee grinds and butters her crumpet. Twenty paces east, in Ms. Feliz’s guest bedroom, the girl tucks her sheets under her mattress. Cha-Cha sits on the windowsill and strikes the glass with his paw. The girl answers in English. She says, “I am making the bed just now. Hold your horses.” The cat spots an eye of dust on the floor and curls his shoulders. His tail swipes back and forth against the frame. The girl joins him at the window. Four raccoons file from the cedar shrubs. They march tallest to smallest, their eyes flashing like coins from their blindfolds, their bellies wiping the grass. The girl fetches the boiled eggs from the fridge and greets the raccoons outside. She has never seen a raccoon in the daytime. Perhaps their hovel flooded. Or do they sleep in trees? The girl knocks an egg against the porch step and peels the shell. She cups the soft moon in her palm and stretches her arm.

Across the street, Mr. Bradley stands so close to the window his breath mists the glass, and he must clear two holes for his eyes. Also, he wears his wife’s housecoat. He can’t wear his own anymore, because last week he got food poisoning from Papa Dum’s. The terry cloth still smells tangy to him, of gastric acid and ghee. He does not tell his wife he borrows her housecoat. He is unsure why, but over the week it turned into an item to conceal.

From the sitting room, he can hear their Barista Express pressurize two thimbles of espresso; he has not learned yet how to adjust the settings to one thimble. The news plays behind him on TV. The murmur keeps him company, like a café. Though this morning he listens for a reason. Colin from 1216 heard rumour of a planned dike breach. They want to divert the river from the next suburb, which is larger, he said. It is unclear to Mr. Bradley if the subdivision is larger, or the residents’ incomes, but he needs to know when to start sandbagging. Worst-case scenario, he owns an inflatable air mattress. He heard that in New Orleans, people floated on anything they could: bookshelves, nightstands. An air mattress should do better than that. They’re engineered to float.

Across the road, the girl from 1213 approaches a troupe of raccoons. He worries the beasts will nip her fingers, or contaminate her hand with fecal matter. He watched a program on raccoon roundworms last week. The parasites can cause human blindness. The girl crouches in Esther Feliz’s yard and reaches her hand to them. Rain stretches the tank top down her ribs.

The girl has not brushed her hair yet. Raindrops trickle down her part and harden the knots into clumps of steel wool. The bushiest raccoon traipses toward her. She plants an egg for him in the grass. He dips the egg in a lawn puddle and lifts it to his mouth. The other raccoons sniff toward her too. Rain has slicked their pelts into spikes around their necks. She deposits another egg. Across the road, the shadows shift in Mr. Bradley’s window. He’s wearing a bathrobe, she realizes. The cloth is lilac. His breath fogs the top pane except two finger-width gaps for his eyes. For the first time, she feels outnumbered. And cold. Her nightshirt’s so wet she must hold up the armholes. She tips the eggs onto the lawn and retreats inside.

In the ripe, photosynthetic bathroom, she shucks her clothes over the shower rod. She stands blue and naked in the mirror and rubs her shoulders with Ms. Feliz’s lotion. In the mirror cupboard, she finds six vials of oil. She selects primrose and wipes it over each wing of her collarbone. Ms. Feliz’s tortoiseshell housecoat hangs on the door. She slips inside it and leaves the bathroom, the hem trailing her heels. She would like to phone her mother, so Mom will microwave her a cup of chocolate and sit on the loveseat to parse her hair. But the longer she waits, the sweeter the nausea she feels behind her belly button. She felt a similar sickness after Mom recycled her diorama of a Kwakiutl longhouse. In return, the girl assaulted her
National Geographic
s with a hole puncher. She knelt with a stack from 1994 to 1998 and opened everyone’s pupils. Her mother cried, then forgave her. The girl felt terrible. But as she punched holes into Jane Goodall’s eyes, into the eyes of race camels and a grey reef shark, she sensed for the first time her imprint on the world. Today she does not sense her imprint but the thrill of endurance. She folds her homesickness into one chamber of her heart and tastes it when she chooses, like a salt lick. She stands in the living room now and faces away from her mother’s window, toward the Bradleys’ house. Mr. Bradley kneels on his carpet and kisses a giant, black-shelled crab. An air mattress, she realizes. She watches from behind her curtain. Her cheek fills with salt.

Twenty paces west, the girl’s mother rinses the grit from her river stones. She separates them by size—thigh stones, facial stones, molar-sized stones for the toes. When her daughter returns, she will book them both a massage. They will lie side by side, which they have not done since last summer. Therapists will map stones up their spines, the same stones she lifted from the river. They will plant stones behind their knees and sink them into their foot arches. She does not remember when her daughter became the only person she thinks about. She knows her shoe size, her jean size. She knows which shops in the mall fit small, and that her daughter will not wear a pencil skirt because she thinks her ribs are boxy. The girl’s mother prefers this shopping to her own, which she has not done in a while. She selects boughs of teen dresses from the racks and the clerk folds them in tissue. She thinks about dinner as she kneels before her bathtub and washes stones. On the first night her daughter slept away, she still cooked her meal. She arranged green beans on the plates with rice and breasts of Shake’n Bake chicken. She tented the plates with foil and knocked on her daughter’s door. They dined at Ms. Feliz’s table, which looked the same as her table, except the salt and pepper shakers were shaped like teeth. But her daughter said she wanted to cook for herself next time. She called it an exercise in independence, which she will present to her CAPP class. The girl’s mother still cooks for two, because it feels silly to measure one serving of rice, or sixty grams of linguine. Now she has half a pizza in her fridge, one bowl of angel hair pasta, and one-half of a trout. She has never liked leftovers. They make her feel old.

Twenty paces east, the girl sits in Ms. Feliz’s window and watches Mr. Bradley step onto his front porch. He has changed from the bathrobe into cream slacks and a cashmere sweater. He carries a box in his hands. When he jogs off the porch, he ducks under it to avoid the rain. He crosses the road and knocks on her door. She knows he has seen her—she’s sitting in a window. You can’t ignore someone if you’re sitting in the window. He rings the doorbell. She tightens the sash around her waist and answers it.

“You’re home,” he says.

“Hi, Mr. Bradley.”

The rain has notched blemishes into his cashmere sweater. They look to her like a colony of ticks.

“I wanted to apologize if I scared you last night.”

“It’s okay.”

“I brought you chocolates.”

He presents a Saran-wrapped box, the plastic beaded with the same wet ticks as his shoulders.

“It’s green. For St. Patrick’s Day.”

The cardboard is black, not green, but the chocolates are filled with peppermint, so perhaps that’s what he means.

“Can I come in?”

“Here?”

“I’m soaked.”

He removes his shoes and follows her inside. She sets the chocolates on the mantelpiece. By the time she turns, he has already sat down on the loveseat. She does not wish to sit beside him. On the only armchair, Cha-Cha sleeps in an immovable crescent.

“Would you like a glass of lemon water?” she asks.

“Sure thing.”

She fetches the jar from the kitchen and pours two glasses. The wheels of lemon do not pass the shoulders of the jar, but she wants one. Before she has time to consider, she plunges her hand in. She clasps a lemon slice and squeezes it like a fish. After she’s done it, she’s not sure what she was thinking. She lifts the lemon to her mouth and sucks its pale triangles. Her gums shrink. She wipes her hands on her housecoat and carries the glasses to the living room.

“Merci beaucoup,”
says Mr. Bradley, in terrible French. He pronounces the
p
as in chicken coop.

“De rien,”
she replies automatically.

“They still make you take French class?”

“Yes.”

She lowers herself onto the edge of Cha-Cha’s armchair.

“That’s good. The French know how to do basic tasks very well. Like toast,” he says. “And kissing.”

She tries not to look at his sock. He has crossed his leg so the foot floats at his knee. The argyle drips off his toes and smells of overripe bananas.

“Learn anything good today?” he asks.

“It’s Saturday.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Does your wife work Saturdays?”

He looks surprised at the mention of her.

“Yes. How’d you know?”

“I’m perceptive I guess.”

=

One kilometre upriver, before the mayor can issue sandbags and order a planned dike breach to minimize damage to the surrounding communities, and indeed as the mayor’s public relations manager, Mindy, books a helicopter to ferry him to the site of the breach so that he can explain the benefits of a controlled dike release to the media and members of the concerned public, and as the mayor himself stands at the Tim Hortons in town with his executive assistant, Marcelle, to select donuts from the pastry counter because he’s a city official who arrives at a controlled dike release with a box of crullers for his staff and crew, and back in Copper Waters, as the girl’s mother tires of waiting for the sun and dries stones with a hand towel, then fills the pockets of her Barbour coat so she can show her daughter next door—she always shows her daughter first; she thinks of it as a blessing—and as the girl sits in the living room with Mr. Bradley and wills the phone to ring, or for her mother to knock on the door, or anyone, even Mormons, even the Census, and as Mr. Bradley stands and says, “Want to see something cool? Be right back,” and jogs across the street for the air mattress, as he opens his door, one kilometre upriver, the water in the soil loosens a tree’s roots from the dike—not the one they intended to release, but another dike, smaller, closer to the Copper Waters subdivision, and as the tree collapses, its root system tears a score of soil from the levee and water bursts through, charts a new channel toward the subdivision at the rate of five hundred cubic feet per second, or enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every three minutes. Mr. Bradley steps back onto his porch with his velveteen air mattress. The plastic is heavy; it forces him to stoop. He almost does not see the mud water heave from the creek. A sinewy rush of it, the brown of upchucked peanuts, overtaking the sidewalk ginkgo trees and Colin Hall’s Chevrolet Camaro. The girl watches Mr. Bradley from her living room window. She turns when he does. The water rages down the street—eight houses up, then seven, then six. Twenty paces west, her mother stands in her living room, pockets filled with stones. The water crashes over the cedar shrubs and shudders against her windows. She cannot see out. The water seeps under the door.