Claudia’s expression was too confident for what he could do to her right now. “Hello.” She did not get up. “How are you?”
“Fine, thank you.”
“Did you have a good sleep?”
“I was tuckered.”
“I’ll bet.” She gave an open, rueful grin. He would be able to fuck her again, if he wanted to. His whole body relaxed.
“You and Mom were in the middle of something. Should I leave you to it?”
“Take a seat, son. I want you to hear this. I would have told it last night, but you and Roberta weren’t around, so I saved it, and then Claudia got to asking about Thunderbird.”
Peter tried not to look startled. Roberta sent Randall over alone, with three kids? Was she trying to make a point? Force them to talk? Maybe she saw the window for a rare night home alone—or with someone else, a thought that made him jealous despite the fact that he was sitting next to a woman he just fucked six ways past Sunday.
His mother waited until he got settled. It occurred to him that she might think he and Roberta had been together. Randall, too.
“My great-grandmother came from across. They’ve kept things going up there. When she told this story, it began this way.”
Claudia looked older than she had yesterday, drawn and furrowed, but she bobbed her head in encouragement. Did she know that, in his mother’s family, “came from across” meant their ancestor had been brought over the strait as a slave? Or did she know about his dad’s side, descended from a highborn tribal member on Vancouver Island, some chiefly Nuu-chah-nulth? Didn’t matter. He sure as hell wouldn’t tell someone like her. He hoped his mother hadn’t either. He wished Claudia hadn’t caught her while he was asleep.
“So a bird . . . I can’t remember what kind . . . it may have been a blue jay, anyway, Blue Jay hires Kwa-Ti—you know, Claudia, the biggest trickster of them all—well, he hires Kwa-Ti to go get the daughter of Blackberry Bird.”
Peter breathed a soft warm scent, a sweet mix of whiskey sweat and soap. His reverie broke when he heard “blackberry bird.” There were no blackberry birds in the bedtime stories he remembered. Did his mom mean salmonberry? Her face was animated but closed, black eyes bright and hard.
“And Kwa-Ti, you know, he’s always singing, letting people know he’s out and about, which is silly if you’re trying to sneak around.”
I wasn’t sneaking, Peter thought. She’s the one with a husband.
“But he gets her anyway.” His mom clapped once. “He takes her to Blue Jay. Later on, everybody’s over at Blue Jay’s house, and Thunderbird sees Blue Jay’s pretty new wife bringing buckets of blackberries. Every time they’d eat ’em up, she’d go out back and get some more.”
His mother was up to something. She knew as well as he did that it was salmonberry bird. And he was pretty sure this wasn’t a Blue Jay story, either. Maybe Robin? He couldn’t recall. But she wouldn’t forget something like that.
“Thunderbird acts like he wants to stretch his wings. He goes out back to watch Blue Jay’s wife call blackberries into the bucket. He decides he wants her for himself. He starts flapping . . .”
Claudia shifted in her seat, the first time she’d moved since he sat down. She clasped her hands. Was she nervous? Good. He liked her better when she was off her game.
“He’s flapping and flapping. The wind gets going, and it’s howling, and there’s thunder. Hail starts a ruckus on the roof. She tries to run back in the house. While she’s distracted, he swoops in, snatches her up and flies away. He’s happy. He got her good. Her house fell down. The hail was big, like boulders, did I tell you that? Everybody else was inside.”
From the corner of his eye, Peter saw Claudia jiggle her leg. Did she feel guilty for cheating? Probably wasn’t the first time.
“Now Blackberry Bird’s daughter is with Thunderbird, living like man and wife. All this time, Blue Jay and Kwa-Ti are trying to get her back, but Kwa-Ti keeps messing it up. Like this one time, they tried to hide as blackberries so she’d gather them up to bring home. Kwa-Ti can’t help himself. He just grows so big. Anyone would know not to pick him.” She made a circle the size of a grapefruit with her hands. “That’s a dead giveaway. Never pick a berry that’s too, too big. It may be sweet, but it’s hiding something.”
And here, his mother paused and looked at him. He sank into the couch. She always knew everything. To hell with it. He rocked forward, ready to fix himself something to eat. Anything to avoid a talking to. He wasn’t a teenager.
“Wait, son, I haven’t finished.” His mom’s cheeks crinkled. She was having fun, dammit. “The best part is coming up.” She turned to Claudia. “This reminded me of that pole you were talking about.
“Blue Jay gets Kwa-Ti to settle down—not for long, of course—and they make like fish and get themselves caught by Thunderbird. When they’re in the house, Blue Jay whispers to his wife, ‘Keep my bones. Take them to the water. Wade in.’ And she does. She becomes a fish, too. They swim away.”
Hands held facing each other, flat as her swollen joints would allow, his mother swayed side to side. Peter saw ripples and tails slipping away in the murk.
“But you know how folks are.” She snorted. “It’s not enough to get what they want. They want revenge, too.”
She bopped the arm of her easy chair. “Kwa-Ti went to Whale and asked to borrow his robe. And Whale told him, said, ‘Now don’t open this mussel shell until you’re ready to put it on.’ But Kwa-Ti don’t listen. You know he had to take a peek.” She cupped her hands together and eased her fingers apart, peering inside. “The whale skin blew up so big, he couldn’t get it back in the shell!”
Claudia laughed, a clean peal that didn’t sound like pandering to Peter.
His mother looked him over. “Kwa-Ti is sneaky—that’s the main thing about him, don’t forget that—and he doesn’t like to admit when he’s done wrong. So he takes some mussel shells and cuts up his own knees.” His mother made claws of her hands and scratched at her kneecaps. “He goes back to Whale and says the shell popped open when he fell.”
Claudia was still chuckling, low and quiet.
“It goes on like that for a while. Whale gets his skin folded up nice and neat in the shell. Kwa-Ti comes dragging the robe back, letting it all hang out, in tatters. Whale said he’d have to see to this himself.”
His mom nodded at him. “It’s always better to do something yourself, that way no one can ask you any favors later.”
But Whale’s the one doing the favor, he thought, and stopped himself. Whale and Kwa-Ti go way back. They must have unfinished business. Why else would you give someone your skin?
Maybe she was referring to how he asked for Claudia’s help. His mom once said that stories reveal the teachings the way light casts a shadow. Maybe she and Randall talked about it at dinner. He flexed his ankles, holding steady, conscious that Claudia had picked up on his discomfort.
“Kwa-Ti and Whale stuff the skin with men and rocks and haul it out to the water in front of Thunderbird’s house, real early in the morning, so no one would see them. Thunderbird spots the whale, and wakes up his sons. ‘Time to hunt.’ They pull on their wings and go outside to get this whale. Man, is it heavy. They couldn’t get it out of the water!” His mother hooked her thumbs together and fluttered her fingers, lifting her hands and letting them drop. “But see, the men inside the whale are busy, too. They’re binding the feet of the birds, tying them to the whale so they would sink together.
“And that’s how the Thunderbirds drowned—every last one of them except their sister, who was out on the beach.”
She waited a moment, making sure she had their attention, before delivering the final word. Shuh. Enough.
Claudia mumbled at her lap. “Those men, and Kwa-Ti—they drowned themselves to get at their enemies.”
His mother clucked. “That’s revenge. Always comes back to bite you.”
“‘Taint not thy mind,’” Claudia whispered.
Hi
s mom was quick to reclaim the stage. “Kwa-Ti is always dying, but he comes back. In disguises. He’s a weasel . . . what’s the word . . . a mink. Thick shiny hair just like yours, Claudia.” She cocked her head, examining their guest. “It’s a good thing you’re here. It’s hard to get Peter to sit through a story. When he was a kid, I used to have to wait until he was half asleep to begin, or he’d bounce right out of the room.”
Claudia left soon after. “I’ll be back.” Wouldn’t stay, even though he asked. “We can start again.”
The trailer seemed dingier after she’d been there—stained shag carpeting, piles of bags, even the clean kitchen. She brightened things only to tarnish them.
For a while, he and his mom sat together. Looking at each other. Not looking at each other. A strange crackling filled the silence, full of the pivot and pull of collided particles. He flicked on the TV and scrounged some food.
Chapter Thirteen
WAY OUT ON the horizon, fog covered the curve of the earth, lolling, rolling in, a wall of white swallowing the neighboring peninsula, funneling through its forests to the mouth of the strait. Claudia watched through her sliding glass door. She could no longer see the fence between her and the shore. Soon, her porch railings and picnic table were erased. Into this roiling blankness came the image of Maria and, unbelievable, the deep longing to tell her sister what she had just done. To ask whether she would be forgiven by the Whom she did not know.
Guilt always felt like their mother, watching from beyond. When it got bad toward the end, Claudia convinced herself there would be visitations, clouds of citrus peel and brown sugar enfolding her in the night, which never materialized.
On her last conscious day, her mother held her hand. “Do well there.”
A buzz began within Claudia’s chest—the urge to scream. “You’re sending me al norte? With him? How do you know he’ll take care of me?”
“Mija.” Her eyes were liquid. “You don’t know what I know. It’s best.”
Late morning light spilled through the wind chimes crowding the hospital ceiling. The spirals of sea glass dangled like jellyfish in thick, poisonous clusters. Her mother sold them before she got sick.
“¿Y María?”
“Her father’s family will take care of her until she’s old enough. Then Thomas will bring her. He promised.”
“Why would he? What do you know? And why just me?”
“Tus dificultades. With boys . . . you will drag her down. Be a good sister.”
Claudia watched fluid drip through the IV. Her books were stacked under the corner table, worn paperbacks abandoned on the beach by hotel guests. A miniature watercolor by Maria was pinned to the wall. A lobster pot. “What if I want to stay?”
“Wherever you are, I will be with you. Our spirit is undivided.”
Claudia imagined an orange, its bright lunar segments flying apart at the touch of one soiled finger, her own. She thought her mother dying was the worst thing. She hadn’t realized how unprotected it left her. She and Maria had never had a dad, it seemed, but in truth, they did have fathers, only that Maria’s walked north for work, and Claudia’s had flown south to play.
Maria escaped the pressures that Thomas heaped on Claudia as though to make up for never having cared before, Claudia studying harder and harder, trying to put her wildness behind her as quickly as possible, not knowing that shame is patient. Her sister arrived years later to attend art school, of all things, having relieved herself of the duty to be more than beautiful and charming. Everyone adored her. It was maddening. Claudia loved Maria—a complex, self-hating love, but love—and yet being compared at close quarters made her want to wriggle out of her skin. As children, they had always been together. Claudia came to measure her own response to the world by how it contrasted with Maria’s, never more clear than the first time their mother showed them how to lobster, one of her many lines of income.
“Take the tail in one hand and the head in the other.” Her callused fingers traced a striped carapace where the lobster’s head separated from its armor. “Twist in opposite directions until you feel the flesh tear.” Its guttural cries quickened. “Keep twisting. Pull the pieces away from each other, like this.”
Her forearm flexed, its scars lengthening as she turned the decapitated head from one side to the next, pivoting its ochre body for her daughters. Lacking claws, the lobster held her hand in a scratchy embrace, whipping its antennae. Its beady eyes bulged.
Translucent pink meat spilled from the tail. Their mother placed the chittering head in Claudia’s palm—its legs crawled, feeble, against her wrist—and encouraged Maria to take the tail. Her sister balked and hid her hands.
Severing her regret, Claudia regarded the interaction at a distance, like a disembodied soul or the anthropologist she would become. She observed herself twisting off five more heads, learning to spot weakness, to find the fissures that widened with pressure. It would come in handy later, in the field.
Managing each brisk beheading, she feigned nonchalance when her mother stopped consoling her sister and noticed her accomplishments scattered on the deck, lifeless. Deep blue water slapped the wooden hull.
That’s when Claudia began to live on two planes of existence at once, marveling at their odd angles of intersection.
Still, it’s terrifying to see the world with yourself inside it. It scared her into performance, if only for her sister’s benefit. Claudia skipped dinner that night. Maria ate her lobster, sopping up the butter with the last heel of bread.
In the states, sisterhood returned with the catty, chatty surety of college friends with a history of long nights and late brunches. Claudia did not question Maria’s motives, but she must have felt abandoned, must have nurtured a long aggrievement, for there could be no other explanation for husband theft. Anger entitled Maria.
Claudia pictured her backyard’s mossy old maple, branches studded with muttering crows. Andrew took the patio furniture. Maria always liked it, the two of them spending summer evenings with bottles of chilled white wine, grilling and listening to the radio while Claudia struggled through revisions. Maria never dedicated herself to anything but her own pleasure, which made her what Andrew wanted Claudia to be, nothing more than available.
“You’re like a guy,” Maria once said. Claudia took it as a compliment. Men did what they wanted. That’s power, she thought, but it was not true. Power was a symphony of personal bloodlettings. She understood that now. True power was getting what you wanted in the end. It didn’t matter what people thought, until it did. Damn her sister.
Claudia pressed her hands and cheek against the coolness of the sliding glass door. Makahs slept near ancestral bones, their blood thick as stone. Every place she lived seemed to crumble out of existence as soon as she left, disintegrating behind her into a pile of rubble.
Maggie was asleep in the big chair by the time Claudia arrived the next morning. Peter saved a plate. Corned beef hash with a twist of orange to the side.
“Let me fry some eggs for you.” Peter heated the cast iron pan.
“I’m not hungry.”
He cut a hunk of butter. It spread into a pool, edges burbling into the black. “I would have done it before, but old eggs aren’t any good.”
She twitched.
With one hand, he cracked two eggs and held their shells apart. Chardonnay-colored whites slid out, yolks bouncing.
She picked up the orange slice. Warm and sweaty, it left an oily sheen on the pale ceramic. She bent the smile from the skin and nibbled the protruding pulp—salted, meaty, tainted. Forcing herself to swallow, she plated the rind so its curls spooned, pith to peel.
“You’re going to need more than that to get through today.”
He tipped the pan over her plate. The eggs tumbled onto the mountain of hash and settled over its crest. Peter pinched some salt from a crusty bowl and threw it on.
She’d resolved not to have any more dealings with him on one level, but beneath it, her body whirred. Sex
does that to a person. For a while. Contempt set in once she got to know someone. Carnality ebbs.
The chair creaked. Peter kicked out his long legs. One knee swerved close to hers. “Get to it.”
Claudia hated to be observed while eating. She stared at the plate, stalling.
“Is breakfast your only meal of the day?”
God, he was presumptuous. “Certainly the heartiest.”
“You only eat when we feed you.”
“Don’t get too excited. I ate before I came. I’m just being polite.”
“Eat.”
Claudia watched her hand pick up the fork and slice a corned beef hash patty into wedges. She stabbed and lifted, not looking at him. The state of being thin issued currency that gained value as she aged and her contemporaries thickened in strange places. Men loved women with appetites, praised gluttony as wanton desire, but they didn’t linger over its results. She had always felt better being petite, but lately, eating had become horrible to her, proof of her lack of control. There was no real alternative.
The cheap metal fork sent bitter echoes across her tongue. Fried golden brown, the hash was crispy. Its edges gave, smashing flat as she chewed and swallowed. Her stomach woke up. A second bite, full of fat. A third. This time the side of her fork tore through a glossy egg, which collapsed, oozing its yellow load. She shoveled a thick forkful of yolky hash straight into her mouth, doing her best not to look at him. She could hear her own breath.
Stomach distended, she reached for her coffee. He wrapped his hand around hers. She stilled, warmed by his palm, by the mug. Her body softened. She wanted a cradle of arms, the coolness of a sheet. Sleep stirred in her, dreams lifting and clouding like silt.
His hand found the back of her neck. Her head drooped, bringing her forehead near enough for him to kiss. His lips were dry. She heard him smile, heard the wet smack of his gums, felt his teeth hard against the curve of her skull.
“I have to go.” She spoke to the smear on her plate.
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