Mostly Dead Things

by Kristen Arnett

“Nasty.” The electronic timer went off for the slice-and-bake cookies. She grabbed the oven mitts, two cartoon dinosaurs that bit either end of the baking sheet. We were playing at a slumber party, but really I was babysitting because everyone else was busy and Lolee was at an age deemed too young to stay by herself, which roughly translated to might invite a boy over to the house and get promiscuous.

  It was something my mother had asked of me, not Milo. My brother never knew what his daughter was doing. When Lolee needed someone, she called me or her grandmother. Milo was like a fun uncle who remembered to bring home ice cream, the kind of dad who took you to the amusement park instead of making you do your homework. Lolee loved him, but I could tell she didn’t trust him to be there for her. Milo would tell you he’d show up for breakfast, and you’d see him two weeks later when he stopped by with beer. No clue what he’d done. Smiling, happy. Nonchalant.

  I was the one who’d talked to Lolee about her body and what she could expect from it. I’d stumbled over my words, showing her the instructions from the box of tampons as a kind of how-to guide. Pointing out the uterus, the cervix, the little line drawings in baby pink and white, cartoon fingers and cartoon vaginas. She’d laughed and then I’d laughed, and it was awkward, but at least it was done.

  Lolee sat back down across from me, hooking her bare feet onto the rungs of my stool. “I stained the mattress pretty bad one time,” she said. “Bled through my underwear, my nightgown, both sets of sheets, and the comforter. I was having a dream that I was swimming in the lake.”

  “I’ve had that one before.”

  We picked cookies off the metal sheet, burning our fingers, licking melted chocolate chips from our palms. Every time we touched a tile, we left behind grease stains.

  “Here’s a good one,” I said. “One time I was messing around with a girl in the back seat of her car. It was really dark and we didn’t realize that she’d started her period until she drove me home.”

  Lolee paused mid-poke. “You’re lying.”

  “I opened the car door and the overhead light came on. That’s when we saw the blood. We had to go to a gas station and wash ourselves in the bathroom sink.”

  “Oh my God. That’s disgusting.”

  The tower fell and rained Jenga tiles all over the kitchen floor. One of them slid beneath the stove. I got down on my hands and knees to retrieve it. When I couldn’t reach, I grabbed the spatula we’d used for the cookies and swept broadly beneath the appliance, jettisoning the tile along with a variety of crumbs, a few old tater tots, and something that might have once been a chicken nugget.

  “Who was the girl?” Lolee dug at stray cookie guts with her fingers.

  “Nobody you know.” How could I tell her that the girl had been her mother? That when Brynn saw the blood all over my hands, she’d laughed until she’d cried? That there’d been a corona of brownish red surrounding my mouth from where I’d sucked the life straight out of her? It was a bittersweet memory. The next night she’d gone out with Milo, and when he’d come home after the movie, there were lipstick stains on his neck. We hadn’t talked about that; we never talked about that.

  My mother normally watched Lolee, but she was out at the gallery again. She’d been there every night for the past few weeks, setting up for some kind of arts showcase, or at least that was what Lucinda had said every time I’d gone to pick up my mother. She described it as incredible, innovative, one of a kind. All those expressions led me to believe I’d hate every part of it, but Lucinda was pretty and I wasn’t going to tell her something mean.

  Lucinda had a raspy voice that made her sound like she’d caught a perpetual cold. She kept her hair knotted on the top of her head and one loose strand curled cutely by her ear. Beautiful in a way that felt effortless, the kind of woman whose entire life is mapped and planned and perfectly maintained without needing to do any work at all. Someone like that would absolutely bail at the first sign of disorder. If I told her our family history, all the death and abandonment and freakish behavior, would she cut my mother off? The embarrassment might be worth it, if it meant my mother would stop shoving her taxidermied porn in people’s faces. But the question was moot, because I could barely string three words together in front of her.

  Lolee put on a movie and we sat cross-legged on the floor. She painted my toenails with gummy green polish and I tried to sit still. She drew a stripe down my big toenail and then texted something on her phone; did another stripe, sent another text. She took a picture of my foot and then sent it to me.

  “I’m right here. We don’t have to text each other.”

  “Shut up and hold still, you’re gonna smear it on the rug.”

  Afterward she painted the nails of all the mounted animals in the living room. The jackrabbit on the mantel got baby pink; the snowy ferrets beside the TV got navy blue. I picked red for the clawed talons of the marsh hawk. It made it look like it had just swooped down and killed something.

  “Get me some fries.” Lolee pulled on her gray hoodie. It had bunny ears attached to the top that flopped around whenever she shook her head.

  We piled into the front seat of my truck. I had on her flip-flops because she said my boots would wreck the polish. They were a size too small, and my bare heel scraped against the sandy floorboard whenever I hit the clutch. She played with the radio and I drove around aimlessly, grabbing fries at the McDonald’s drive-thru and then getting ice cream from the gas station. It was freezer-burned, and we had to eat around the bad parts with little wooden spoons they kept by the register.

  If I looked at her from the corner of my eye, it felt like driving around with Brynn. She put her feet up on the dash and yanked my hair when I made fun of her baby lisp. Her voice sounded the same as her mother’s, kind of throaty with a propensity to trail up in pitch at the ends of her sentences, especially if she was whining about something. I wasn’t the kind of person who made friends easily. I’d been closest to Brynn, and there was Milo, and then my father. Brynn had left, my father was dead, and Milo was so stuck in his own head there was no talking to him about anything. I spent lots of late nights parked in front of my television or in the shop, drinking beer until I couldn’t see straight and didn’t care if the pelts refused to talk back to me.

  Need, I thought, was a stealthy invader.

  We took our food down to the lake. There were a few lights still on in the parking lot, but it was mostly dark. Our steps down to the dock were guided by dumb luck and milky moonlight glowing through cloud cover. Lolee clung to my arm and I held the sack of leftover fries, grease soaking the paper bag and dirtying my shirt.

  A dank mineral scent was coming off the water. It lapped the dock in smooth bursts, wake smacking the shore and leaving behind slick trails of muck from the reeds.

  “I wanna swim,” Lolee said, kicking off her shoes.

  “It’s too dark.”

  She pulled off her T-shirt and shorts, jumping into the water wearing just her underwear. The water rippled. When she emerged again, her head was sleek as a seal.

  I fed her fries when she paddled up to the dock, clinging to the wood with her pruned fingers, complaining about splinters. Her lips were spitty and shone in the moonlight. It reminded me of when she was little, how she only ever wanted to eat if someone else was feeding her. Brynn called her “baby bird,” and she’d looked like one with her little peaked face and beaky nose. She had colic so bad it kept the whole house up every night. I’m never doing this again, never having another baby, Brynn said. She handed off Lolee any chance she got—to my mother, to me, to strangers in the grocery store. I just want a break, she told me. There were purple circles under her eyes like they’d been drawn there with marker. If I could do it all over again, maybe I’d take a harder look at college. Maybe I should have left right after Bastien.

  “There’s too much algae down here.” Lolee kicked hard and the wake spilled up onto the shore from the force.

  “It’s probably a snake.”

  “
Yeah, right.” She splashed me with a cupped palm and I moved the bag out of the way so it wouldn’t soak up the lake water.

  “I’m standing on so many cypress knees. I’m gonna fall and bust my ass when I get out.”

  “I’ll pull you up this way.”

  She swam out farther, legs churning white. “Nope. I’ll get splinters.”

  Our fries were cold, but I wasn’t really hungry anymore. Just playing with my food. I doused the whole sack in ketchup and watched her swim out farther, far enough that her head was only a dark speck bobbing on the surface.

  “Come back now,” I called, barely able to see her. She splashed more, naming every stroke she’d learned in swimming lessons.

  “Breaststroke, doggy paddle.” She moved in jagged spurts, the water parting around her. “Butterfly, doggy paddle. Freestyle, doggy paddle.”

  Panting, she reached the dock and held up a hand. I pulled her up quick, but she still scraped the top of her thigh.

  “Jesus! Told you I’d get splinters.”

  Lights illuminated the water red and blue, smearing together and staining everything purple. A car door slammed, the sound echoing off the lake.

  “Hurry up and get your clothes on.” I thrust her yellow T-shirt at her when she was too slow to grab it herself. Her tiny shorts got stuck halfway up her legs as she yanked them over her wet skin.

  The police officer walked down the dock and shined a flashlight in our faces. I moved in front of Lolee, who finally managed to pull her shorts over her underwear.

  “Park closes at sundown.”

  “Just having dinner.” I held up the crumpled paper bag, but the light never left my face.

  “You eating in the water?” The flashlight’s beam shifted to Lolee and swam around her wet head, two damp circles delineating where her bra had sopped up the lake.

  “We were about to leave.”

  “Let’s see some identification.”

  The officer was young and I didn’t recognize him. Very blond with a sharp jaw. He smelled musky, like cologne that had been sitting on someone’s shelf for too long. I dug into the back pocket of my jeans and pulled out my wallet. It was Velcro and made an embarrassing noise when it opened.

  He took my license and gestured at Lolee. “I’ll need yours.”

  “She’s fourteen.” He flashed the light back in my eyes. It burned there, a lit cigarette butt pressed to my brain. I tried to smile. “She’s my niece.”

  He still had my license, looking at it hard like it might change if he shook it. “This your idea of babysitting?”

  “We’re just having some fun. It’s Friday night.”

  The beam flicked off our faces and danced along the waterfront, through the swaths of cattails and reeds. Glowing green-blue pinpricks lit in pairs of two. “It’s gonna be real fun when we have to come down here tomorrow and drag the lake because a gator bit off your arm.”

  It had happened before, a couple of summers after high school. We watched it on the news in my parents’ living room, Brynn parked in Milo’s lap and me holding Bastien. I hope you kids would never be so stupid, my father said, shaking his head. Brynn and I looked at each other and tried not to laugh. The three of us swam in the lake most nights in the summer, not usually wearing clothes. Gators are disgusting, Brynn replied, shuddering, and then Milo dug his hands into either side of her waist and yelled gator bait until she screamed and I walked Bastien in the other room so I wouldn’t have to watch.

  The officer handed me back my license and escorted us to the parking lot. He continued to lecture me on the dangers of night swimming in Florida lakes while staring at the wet circles over my niece’s breasts. I handed her the hoodie she’d brought and helped her put it on, zipping it up beneath her throat.

  “If you do this kind of thing again, I’ll have to take you in.”

  I couldn’t think of a bigger waste of tax dollars. “Absolutely.”

  The officer got back in his car and drove away. I stood there feeling stupid and aggravated with myself, wondering what Brynn would think of me doing something so pointless and dangerous with her kid. Probably laugh. Probably do the exact same thing herself. I threw our trash in the Dumpster next to the lot, and a horde of black flies flew up and settled back down. Fragments of pinecone bit into the sole of my one bare foot.

  Lolee put her hand on my arm. “Where’s the other flip-flop?”

  “Floating around with the alligators. I’ll buy you new ones.”

  We drove home on the back roads that bordered the lake. I watched for flashing lights in my rearview, but the streets stayed dark.

  An espresso maker sat in the back office of the gallery. As soon as I came in, Lucinda would duck behind the slick black-and-white counter and I’d hear the coughing sputter of the machine. The burnt smell covered the awful odor of wet paint that haunted the place. She’d hand me a cup then and stand quietly while I drank it. The ritual of it helped. Most times I walked in a zipping snarl of nerves, too keyed up to think straight. I didn’t like being places where I felt out of my element. I liked stability, the comfort of knowing my surroundings and what to expect.

  Lucinda stood there in her beautiful clothes and looked like she already knew I wasn’t worth the time. With Brynn, I’d held a constant pit in my gut. The burning knowledge that I’d never get to keep her. Never really have her the way I wanted. This was a different experience. It felt like Lucinda was waiting for me to make a wrong move.

  “Another?” Lucinda asked, pointing toward the back.

  I shook my head and barely sipped the one I held.

  Up front was better. It was too hard to watch my mother dissect animals that my father and I had spent so long constructing. She unraveled stitches and shredded hide, yanking the seam ripper through fabric and wire. Glued green sequins onto nostrils, dripping strands of spangled snot. Built fluids from latex. Made puddles of gore. Then there was the bondage gear acquired from online stores. They shipped unlabeled boxes to my mother’s house that piled in listing towers outside the front door.

  I couldn’t process the way my mother used sex in her art. It was as if my father’s death had set something loose in her, bottled up for the entirety of their marriage. When my brother and I were growing up, my mother had never talked to us about sex. Never mentioned a single thing that would lead me to believe she’d be capable of creating sex-toy art. She’d sometimes joked around with Milo, teasing him about girls, but it was always lighthearted. Never anything graphic or profane. She hadn’t even liked touching most of the taxidermied stuff. Had never once asked my father if she could help out in the store, as far as I knew.

  Let me talk to you about it, she had said as she pulled S&M gear from boxes. There’s a lot you should know.

  I didn’t want to know any of it. I wished I knew less.

  My mother plugged ball gags into mouths broken open with pliers, wrenched out teeth and sliced off papery tongues. She stuck these inside a clear plastic pouch that hung from the back end of a beaver, the anus an open wound surrounded with more sequins, these ones red. There were handcuffs lined with orange-red fox fur. She used a nail gun to adhere nipple clamps to a female elk whose legs she’d sawn off at the knees.

  It felt like watching a low-budget slasher film. I wanted to fast-forward to the end, to get to the part where we could pretend none of it had happened. This wouldn’t be one of those things we’d be able to talk about fondly, a funny memory we discussed over coffee. It was going to be something that wrecked us all and made it so we couldn’t ever look at each other again. The previous week, when I refused to go into the back to look at the pieces, my mother brought up my father again.

  If you knew how often he had his way, how many times he took from me, you wouldn’t begrudge me this one stupid thing.

  Tired of thinking about it, I put my cup on the counter and rubbed my eyes.

  “Would you like to sit down?” Lucinda asked. “Come on.”

  I hadn’t seen anyone but Lucinda go i
nto the back rooms aside from one other person—a short woman, decidedly more butch, who usually wore work boots and a beat-up denim jacket with a ripped collar and pins for bands I absolutely did not know. We’d nodded at each other on occasion, but she never spoke to anyone, aside from Lucinda. They seemed . . . close.

  Maybe she was another gallery artist. Maybe she was creating a bunch of horrific exhibits that her family could feel embarrassed over. Although she didn’t seem to be there for the art. She seemed to be there for Lucinda.

  It was cooler in the back. AC flooded the vents and ruffled the wisps of hair at my temples. A desk that was much too large for the room took up a whole corner of the office. It was stacked full of messy paperwork and empty mugs. The espresso maker was on the small cabinet opposite, and the papers around it were covered in dark spatter. Crumpled napkins and plastic sandwich containers lay scattered around an overflowing garbage can. I put my own cup down on a stack of envelopes and had to catch it when an avalanche of them spilled onto the floor.

  “This is your office?” I asked. It was the antithesis of her public persona. Everything was dirty and unorganized. Open boxes and tissue paper littered the floor. It was hard to maneuver without tripping over something.

  “It’s where I keep all the office stuff. Invoices, whatever.” She was more relaxed here than out front. Her shoulders sloped downward and her mouth looked less severe, more tender. She stroked a hand through her hair and stared at me. I looked away.

  Framed posters covered the walls. Two were black-and-white comic strip art, vintage ones featuring women dressed in 1940s garb: hats and boxy jackets. The others were color prints that looked like they could have come from the front of old novels. There were titles like Women in Shadows and Queer Pulp. I turned toward the doorway. It felt safest to look there.

  “I like your art,” I said, then cleared my throat. “It’s nice.”

  She laughed. “This art you like.” All her hard angles softened when she smiled. It made her look younger and a lot more approachable. Her chin rounded and her eyebrows lifted. “What do you think of your mother’s work?” One cheek dimpled. The left cheek. It held its sharp indent, as if someone were digging into her with a fingernail.