Fierce Little Thing

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  “You’re right. Of course you’re right.” Then: “Are you still paying Philip’s rent?”

  “How’s your mom, Cor?”

  That shuts her up. For a minute. “That big old house gives me the creeps. So many rooms. All that old furniture. That’s where”—she quiets her voice—“the murder happened, right?”

  “Yes, that’s where Will died.”

  “Just tragic.” Of course she wants every detail. She’d be disappointed; Xavier doesn’t know much more than what the papers printed: a father filled with rage on a beautiful Connecticut day. I made my pledge to Grandmother as we watched Mother weep in the drive. I’ve kept your last day locked inside me ever since.

  “Don’t you think the house is pretty, though?” Xavier says. He’s good to me, that one. “It must be hard, to live alone inside the museum of your worst day. No, I really do, I feel terrible for her.”

  “You’re a saint, Xavier.”

  He ignores this. “Real Chippendale, a lot of that stuff. Priceless.”

  “I thought her grandmother disowned her.”

  His gaze hits the rearview mirror, but I close my eyes before he catches me. “The old woman was a bitch, but she knew Saskia didn’t get a fair shot.”

  “What about her mother? Where is she?”

  Sekou wails with a bad dream. Issy rouses, hands over the seat before her eyes even open. The little boy thrashes at his restraints. He hits a high shriek, zero to sixty. I produce a very convincing, very disoriented yawn, if I do say so myself.

  “It’s okay,” Cornelia singsongs from the front seat. “It’s okay.” But the boy is not to be consoled.

  “Oh I once had a horse and his name was Bill”—Issy eases into the song right away, her voice still groggy—“When he ran he couldn’t stand still. He ran away one day, and also I ran with him.”

  The effect is immediate. The boy’s eyes open from the trap of the nightmare. His body stills. Issy strokes his hand. He starts to cry again, in the absence of the song.

  “He ran so fast that he could not stop. He ran into a barber’s shop, and fell exhaustionized with his eye teeth in the barber’s left shoulder.” She’s singing quietly, but it fills the car.

  “How about ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider,’” says Cornelia, voice sugary with false cheer.

  Issy sighs.

  Cornelia begins her ditty, hand gestures and all.

  Sekou screams: “Horse Named Bill!”

  Issy gives a sad smile. “It’s the only thing that works.” I know, then, that she has tried many songs, and that the fact that her baby loves this one has been a difficult truth to bear. We take up the familiar melody together. Eventually even Cornelia warbles along.

  62

  When Cornelia was done singing, the Homesteaders made their way toward their morning labors.

  Philip clasped a hand onto the back of Xavier’s neck, and they strolled to the cabin together. Why hadn’t Xavier told me he was gay? Why hadn’t Philip? It made me feel cold inside. I wanted to know the right thing to say, but I supposed if he didn’t want to talk to me about it, then the right thing was just not to say anything?

  Ben asked his mother what we were having for dinner. She called to Nora to gather up the baskets. Ephraim pecked Sarah on the cheek and left for the toolshed, and Sarah, in turn, took Ben by the arm, while he grumbled that just because he asked about dinner didn’t mean he wanted to make it.

  Cornelia watched Ben go. Issy took her cards from her pocket, slipped her arm through Cornelia’s, and whispered something into Cornelia’s ear that made her blush and giggle. They headed out along the waterfront.

  Teresa, already halfway up the path, told Jim to pick up Tomas. He obliged but trudged behind her slowly, until Teresa yelled back down, “Could you go any slower?” He returned the favor by setting Tomas, howling, into the dirt.

  Nora skipped up the path past them, empty baskets dragging. Tomas hopped to his feet as if nothing was wrong, and chased Nora under the cover of the trees.

  Teresa watched Jim return to the shore, to Butterfly, then resumed her climb alone.

  Butterfly waded into the lake again, skirt blackening. Abraham approached her. “Did Cornelia get that glorious voice from you?” The dog licked Butterfly’s hand.

  She laughed, glancing at Abraham over her shoulder. “Absolutely not.”

  It was hot now, the sun shimmering over the top of the lake all the way out to Blueberry Island. I couldn’t tear my eyes off Butterfly. It was like I wanted to solve her, solve why I liked the way she looked at Philip, but not at Abraham. I wanted to understand why I could find Jim’s interest in her pathetic, and yet still want to know everything about it, and how someone like Cornelia, tidy and discreet, could come out of someone like her.

  “That Cornelia girl can sing.” Jim appeared beside me. We watched Abraham and Butterfly, how their heads curved toward each other. I told myself I was looking because I needed Abraham: I’d sidle up as soon as he was done with Butterfly and say something wise. After Cornelia’s performance, after how he’d seen Xavier, I needed to be noticed, too. Why hadn’t he asked me about what made me special? Why didn’t he want to know?

  Jim chuckled at my silence. “Don’t like her much, do you?”

  “I like her.”

  “Abraham.” That was Gabby, from ten yards down the shore. “I told you, we need to talk.” Abraham drew away from Butterfly. In his absence, she lifted her eyes to Jim. Jim stepped toward her as though I wasn’t even there.

  “Saskia was just saying your girl sure can sing,” he said.

  “My mother was in the church choir. I used to sit in the front pew and think she sounded like an angel.”

  “Church?” Jim laughed. “It’s hard to imagine you in church.” The thunk of hammers started from the hillside.

  Gabby was leaning toward Abraham, ticking off points on her fingers. I wandered between the two parties, to the dock. I busied myself with unwinding the kayak ropes. The dog found me fast. He sniffed my fingertips, then settled in beside me, panting and eager, less of a threat now that he knew I had no food. The water glugged, rattling the boats against their moorings. I made every effort not to look at Gabby and Abraham as they huddled, but I couldn’t help overhear.

  “Surely you agree we need to pay our mortgage.” Gabby’s voice was careful.

  Abraham waved his hand. “Unthing yourself of this concern. I’ve told you, it’s working out. Unthing yourself of the idea that you must take this burden on alone.”

  “It’s not my burden,” she said. “I’ve been asked to manage our money. You’ve got to let me do my job.”

  “That’s just it,” Abraham said, and there was ice in his voice, “you must Unthing yourself of the idea that you have any kind of job here.” He pointed back to where he had embraced Xavier. “Our job, if you want to call it that, is to Unthing ourselves of what is expected of us, and expand our—”

  “Okay.” Gabby collected herself. “Abraham, I get it. What I am trying to tell you is that we have to pay the bank this month. If we want to stay on this land, we’ve got to pay our mortgage every single month. You asked me to help you, so I’m—”

  “Jim?”

  Jim’s head lifted eagerly. He came right over.

  “I need your help,” Abraham said.

  Jim lifted his eyebrows in surprise. “Yeah, sure.”

  “I need you to take over the banking.”

  “Really?”

  “No,” Gabby said, “not really.”

  “You don’t think Jim will do a good job?”

  “I’ll do a good job,” Jim said.

  “Gabby has so much on her plate.”

  “Abraham, come on,” Gabby said.

  “She helps us so,” Abraham said, “but it’s time she Unthings herself of the idea that she must be the one holding the purse strings. Don’t you agree, Jim?”

  “I can absolutely help.”

  “Abraham,” Gabby said.

  “Walk with me.”
>
  Jim grinned. The dog scuttled to Abraham’s heels. They moved on, away from Gabby.

  Abraham stopped then, as if he’d just thought of something important. He turned and looked at me on the dock.

  “Glad to be back, Saskia?” It was feeling the sun again, to have his eyes on only me. “Good. Good. Take up that hatchet. Issy’s been keeping it safe.”

  I tried not to look disappointed that this was all he said, that then he climbed the hill without another look. Jim and the dog trailed behind. Gabby ran her hand over her skull and sighed, and quickened her steps to catch up. I watched them move up the hill, watched how Abraham kept ahead of her so that she found herself talking to his back, until their voices faded and all I could hear was the lap of the water, and the scolding of a chipmunk, and, far above me, a cardinal ringing out his competent song.

  “Dog likes you.” A voice from behind me.

  I’d forgotten how small Marta was up close, her face wrinkled below the silver cap of her hair. I pretended not to be startled. “You call him Dog?”

  “Better than what Nora wants to call him.” She came closer. My hands stilled at their false task. How much had she overheard?

  “I’ve decided to teach you,” she announced, “about the plants. And the animals. I’m going to teach you about what lives on our land.” Abraham would have said to Unthing ourselves from the notion that any of this was ours. But the day Marta had thrown the hatchet, I’d seen she understood something different about the natural world; that to name it was to know it, and to know it was to love it. I wanted to understand, too—the common names, and the scientific ones, the uses for whatever we discovered. Not only because I was interested, but because to speak the language of this place was another way to get close to you. You were out there somewhere, wandering, waiting; I had come upon bits and pieces of you, and haphazardly. This way, I could show you how serious I was. I’d pluck a flower and Marta would tell me it had your name folded within its own, or I’d find myself marveling at a field adorned with golden-tipped feathers.

  “It’s not all tromping around the countryside,” she said. “There is plenty to memorize, and that requires discipline. Most folks here think the best thing for children is to keep their hands busy. But I see more for you than making bread.”

  “Abraham wants me to learn to use the hatchet.”

  “Bring the hatchet, then. Bring your friends, if you want—Isobel, Cornelia, Benjamin, Xavier.”

  I opened my mouth to protest—Cornelia and Ben were most certainly not my friends—but she cut me off. “Studying will be good for them. We’ll keep your minds nimble, despite what these people want.” I saw plainly, then, how someone who knew the scientific names of every living thing would chafe here. I wondered why she stayed.

  63

  No one can make anyone else eat, except Issy. Over the backseat, she hands Sekou a leftover burger bun. He offers it up in his sweet, small palm, and next thing I know, I’m choking down a nibble. I manage to swallow, my stomach a fist. Sekou babbles a happy song, a toddlerized version of “A Horse Named Bill,” with some “ABCs” tossed in.

  We’re on a curvy road now. The country. No oncoming traffic; perhaps, already, Maine. A sliver of moon.

  “How are your girls?” I ask Cornelia. She’ll be useful later.

  “They’re fantastic!” Cornelia unlocks her phone, fingers flying. She spins in her seat to hand over the device. “Margaux’s in the ballet two program at the dance school! And McKinley’s pitching for her softball team!” Where are the gap-toothed smiles and knocked knees? Their breasts already press at their T-shirts. The arm of the pretty one is slung over the shoulder of the one who’ll surely explore her sexuality. “They’re both doing better than a 4.0 GPA and are in a chess club, though we’re not going to hold on to that much longer because it’s just not where their passions lie. Just wait, Issy. All these extracurriculars to get into college!”

  Issy taps my shoulder for the phone. She whistles at the sight of them. “They’re—what? Thirteen?”

  Cornelia nods. “My St. Patrick’s babies.”

  “They have serious boobs.”

  Cornelia coughs politely. “They both have crushes! But Eric is vehement—no dating until they’re sixteen.” She holds out her hand, an impatient waggle. Issy passes the phone to me but Sekou reaches for it. Now he’s crying again, laden with want.

  “Let him have it,” says Cornelia. “I’ve got unlimited data.”

  “He doesn’t watch TV.”

  “An hour of screen time isn’t going to kill him, Iss. And I think we could all use a break from that horrible song.” The boy settles after Cornelia calls up Elmo and the machine is back in his grubby little hands.

  “Thirteen, huh?” I say. “That’s how old we were when we met.”

  “I was twelve,” Cornelia says. “Ben and I, always trailing a few months behind. Of course I was madly in love with you, Xavier.”

  “Who wasn’t,” says Issy.

  “I wasn’t,” I say.

  “Because you,” Cornelia says, “were in love with Ben.” We all remember her eyes were drinking him in, her nervous laugh when he looked at her, the twirling of her finger in her hair. But I’ll save this retort for when it matters.

  We steer through a small town. A corner pump, a general store, electric in the night—then gone. “Do you think Gabby and Abraham ever did it?” I ask.

  Issy cackles. Sekou brightens at his mother’s pleasure and drops the phone into his lap. He pulls a fistful of French fries from his drink cup. He shoves them into his gleeful mouth. You’re there in the gesture. Then it’s only him, peering again at the small screen, and he is enough.

  “I have no idea who she had sex with,” Issy says. “Not even my bio dad. Maybe I’m the product of a virgin birth.”

  “Gabby was too smart for sex,” Cornelia says. “She didn’t let it control her.” In that comment hides Butterfly’s shadow, but none of us are touching it with a ten-foot pole.

  Instead I say, “I always wondered about Gabby and Abraham. He was so … charismatic. There has to have been some reason she put up with his bullshit.”

  “She believed in his cause,” Cornelia says.

  “But it was also that he was sexy. Come on, it’s not going to hurt you to admit it. We all wanted to fuck him. I mean, of course we didn’t fuck him, and we didn’t even know that that’s what was driving us. We were children. It was easy to have a crush on him, or whatever we want to call it. We were supposed to! That was how he got us to do what he wanted. He used it, that … thing he had, charisma, whatever, to get us to do what he said.”

  Their collective silence hangs over me like the funk of the fast food.

  “Did Abraham ever…?” Xavier says. “Saskia, he didn’t ever try to…?”

  “No,” I say, although now whatever I say they’ll doubt. “No, of course not. Never.”

  Issy and Xavier’s eyes meet in the mirror. She sits forward. “Because the whole thing with—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “But if you—”

  “She doesn’t want to talk about it,” Cornelia says, surprising us all as she defends me. Elmo’s whine fills the car.

  “Maybe Gabby was just at some higher level of consciousness than the rest of the human race,” I finally say, to try to salvage the conversation.

  “She probably would have been happier,” Issy says, “if she’d have just done it every now and then. I don’t know about you guys, but if I go awhile without sex, I turn into some kind of maniac, amputated from rational thought, sure I don’t need it at all, when what I really need is to cum hard.”

  Cornelia covers her mouth in shock. I don’t imagine Eric is giving it to her that often. Between that, and Xavier’s domestic tragedy, and how I’ve spent the last decade and a half, there’s a good chance Issy’s done it a lot more recently than the rest of us. I’m about to say as much, when she fumbles toward an ugly truth. “Cor, how’s your mo
m doing these days?” The train of thought: Gabby was not a slut. Butterfly, on the other hand …

  “Oh, she’s…” Cornelia says, “well, I suppose she’s fine. She’s um, she’s still up in Canada. I mean, I think she is.”

  How cruel Cornelia was with Xavier, pressing him about my relationship with Philip. What goes around. “You’re not in touch?”

  “We are! Kind of. I just. You know. It’s hard.”

  Xavier clears his throat. He turns his head Cornelia’s way. “Is she still with Ephraim?” Good to get this out in the open before we’re with Ben. Historically, he hasn’t been a fan of discussing his father leaving his mother for Cornelia’s.

  Cornelia nods. Xavier pats her arm. “It’s okay.”

  She shakes her head. “No.” Grief swells her voice. “No, it’s not okay. None of it was. I feel so awful that my mother was responsible for so much of what went wrong.”

  “Don’t slut shame her,” Issy says. “The end was coming long before Butterfly fucked Ephraim. I mean, sex is power or whatever, but your mom’s magical pussy did not destroy Home.”

  Cornelia doubles over. She covers her face. Her shoulders start to shake. When I glance Issy’s way, she mouths: “Oops.”

  Xavier touches Cornelia’s shoulder. This gesture lifts her head. Unhinged laughter fills the car. She has not, as we’ve all assumed, been sobbing. In fact, she can barely breathe, she’s laughing so hard. We chuckle as she cackles. She wipes tears from her eyes. “Magical,” Cornelia manages to gasp. “Her pussy was…” and we lose her again.

  Eventually she stops laughing hard enough that she can put together a string of words. She dabs at her eyes. “You have no idea how good it feels to be able to talk about this. Do you know that Eric thinks my mom is just ‘eccentric’? What the hell am I supposed to tell the girls?”

  “Tell them Grandma likes cock,” Issy says. “Sex positivity is all the rage.”

  You can practically hear Cornelia’s eyes roll.

  “I mean it! Butterfly didn’t do anything those men didn’t. Abraham shouldn’t have been fucking anyone at Home, not to mention a newly divorced hottie under his spiritual care—no matter how sexy Saskia thinks he is.”