Mostly Dead Things

by Kristen Arnett

  One month, two months. After the third month with no word, Bastien stopped asking about her. She’d missed his tenth birthday. There was a party at the bowling alley down the street. A lot of people showed up. Lots of balloons and pizza and streamers. It was one of the worst days of my life.

  Milo bought gifts haphazardly and with very little thought: sports equipment Bastien didn’t want and video games he already owned. They were the kind of gifts my own father would have bought for Milo. The kind of gifts that said I know nothing about you; you’re a part of my life I ignore and your birthday means that little to me. I took everything back and exchanged it for the stuff Bastien actually asked for. I put Milo’s name on the front, barely restraining myself from writing Brynn’s alongside it. Hopeful she’d remember her son’s birthday and show up.

  We served cake and half-melted ice cream. Nine kids came and bowled three rounds. I handed out tokens in little Dixie cups to play the outdated arcade games: Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Galaga. When we were growing up, Milo’d had two birthday parties there and I’d had one. Brynn and I’d taken so many pictures in the photo booth we could’ve papered a wall with all the photo strips.

  I hated being around Milo’s wallowing, but I couldn’t stand to be alone. In my apartment I sat up all night drinking and watching TV, praying I’d hollow out and stop caring. Every place that used to feel comfortable to me just felt filled with Brynn. Every place in town held a memory. The movie theater where she’d barfed Sno-Caps. A gas station parking lot where we’d gotten strangers to buy us lime-flavored wine cooler. There was no escape.

  I spent all my free time at my parents’ house with the kids and used them as a distraction. We built forts, played in the sprinklers, wandered the graveyard. My mother said nothing, just stared at us with sad eyes and made too much food.

  When I was over there, I found myself looking for traces. Clues. Brynn wasn’t the kind of person who’d kept a diary. She liked shouting her feelings at the top of her lungs so everyone could experience them with her. I knew every bad thing she thought about anyone, including myself. No one knew her better than I did, but I couldn’t think of a single way to reach her.

  Her mother had moved down to Boca a year after Brynn and Milo got married. They weren’t on speaking terms. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I snuck her number from my mother’s address book and called. As the phone rang I prayed Brynn would be the one to pick up. Knew I’d be able to tell it was her even by the way her breath touched the receiver.

  A man answered. He sounded boyish, even for Brynn’s mother, whose taste in husbands ran toward half her age.

  Can I speak with Marsha?

  Who’s calling? The voice was sullen, kind of defensive.

  Tell her it’s Jessa-Lynn.

  There was a pause and the tone brightened. Hey. Jessa. It’s Gideon.

  The last time I’d seen him was before he’d hit puberty and still sounded like a chew toy someone had stepped on. Brynn’s little brother—half brother, I amended, just like Brynn would have done.

  Is your mom there?

  Nah, she’s at work. Probably won’t be back till pretty late tonight. You know Mom.

  The day stretched out in front of me like an endless nightmare. Even if he gave her the message, there was no guarantee she’d call back. Marsha Wiley was even flakier than her daughter. Could you give her my number? I need to talk with her.

  There was laughter in the background; maybe a television set. Maybe the radio. He sighed. You can ask, you know.

  I was too needy to pretend I didn’t understand what he meant. I went ahead and asked if they’d heard from her. I promised not to tell Milo. I’d have promised anything for an answer. Anything to explain why this had happened.

  Not recently, he said. But yeah. She’s been by.

  It was a careful response; one I’d anticipated. Is she okay?

  She’s fine. The same Brynn.

  More muted laughter, a door slamming. Was it her? There was no way to know. I dug my fingernails into my palm and focused on the burn.

  I’ll tell her you called, he said, and then he hung up.

  Wait. There was still work to finish. Wasn’t there always something?

  Handfuls of hair littered the counter. My father had always called it “a woman’s crowning glory.” He’d told me never to cut mine, that it was as beautiful as my mother’s.

  Gingerly I touched the places I’d torn fistfuls straight from the root, rough patches where tingling radiated from the skin. I’d torn two nails down to the quick and blood welled beneath the pinky on my right hand. My whole body jittered and shook. I pressed my face to the cool metal of the table and wept until I couldn’t breathe. Cried until my chest wanted to collapse.

  When I was done, I wiped my face with the hem of my shirt. Gathering up the handfuls of hair, I separated the collected bundle into two sections and rolled them. Then I opened up the raccoon bodies and slipped a knot of my hair into each tiny stomach.

  I drank one more beer and cried again. My eyes burned as if I’d rubbed sand in them. Wiped my face again, finished the beer. Threw out the empty.

  Turning off the lights, I left the work half assembled on the countertop and fell asleep on the cot. When I woke the next morning, the raccoons were gone. My father had covered me with his Florida State sweatshirt, a huge thing that he always wore in lieu of a coat on the five occasions a year it actually dropped below sixty degrees in Central Florida.

  He squeezed my shoulder, then cupped the side of my head with his warm hand. Pull up the hood, sweetheart. Your hair’s a wreck.

  7

  After the unveiling of the buffalo, Milo’s eyes looked glazed, as if he were trapped underwater. We both turned our attention to the TV set, which was playing a rerun of some crime show. On-screen, a woman sprayed luminol onto a linoleum kitchen floor. When an investigator turned out the lights, the room glowed like a radioactive chamber.

  “It never looks like that,” Bastien said, cutting himself another slice of pie. “Way too bright.”

  “What are we going to do?” I asked my brother. People milled around, acting as if there weren’t a gigantic buffalo covered in S&M props taking up half the living room.

  “About what?” He picked at the crust of his egg custard until Lolee took his plate to scavenge the remains. I put my hands over her ears.

  “About what just happened, you fucking dummy. Mom obviously had a breakdown.” I nodded vaguely toward the monstrosity, unwilling to raise my eyes above its broad sides, where the patent leather leg still dangled.

  “It’s gonna be fine. Probably good for her, right? Get it all out of her system.”

  It was the complete opposite of fine. My brother, the one with the insight and empathy to understand what people needed, couldn’t even be trusted to look at our poor mother and know that something had gone horribly wrong.

  He stared at the TV, wiping his clean lips repeatedly with a folded napkin.

  “You’re delusional,” I said. Lolee got up and moved toward the water buffalo and I snagged her back by a belt loop. “Go play outside,” I told her, pushing her toward the back patio.

  “I’m with Aunt Jessa, Grandma has fucking lost it.” Bastien dug into his pie, crumbs clumped in the corner of his mouth. “Weirdest shit I’ve ever seen.”

  “Shut up. Go help.” Milo pointed at the empty plates. “And take those in with you.”

  Bastien made a face but did as he was told. I turned to Milo and tried again. “I’m honestly worried about her mental state. She thinks this is a healthy way to grieve Dad. What does that tell you?”

  He shrugged and leaned back against the sofa cushions. “I dunno. People all handle shit different, I guess.”

  I couldn’t understand why he was acting this way. I took a breath, trying to think up something reasonable to counter his argument. “That is the stupidest thing you’ve ever said.”

  Jay and Travis stood talking beside the buffalo while they finished th
eir coffee. Travis smoothed a hand up and down its neck, perilously close to the leather figure’s thigh. “This is real well done,” Travis said, picking up a wooden paddle studded with blunt spikes. “You ever seen one of these before?”

  Jay looked like he was going to respond, but Vera shot him a look that promised death. “Nope, don’t think I have.”

  I tried again. “It’s not right. She needs to see a therapist, something.”

  “What do you expect us to do about it, Jessa?” Milo rubbed a hand across his forehead. “She’s a grown woman. She can do whatever she wants.”

  “Well, I’m putting a stop to it,” I said, trying to convince the both of us.

  I found Lucinda in the hallway, examining some of our family photos. She touched the edge of a frame, one where the four of us posed in front of a craggy waterfall. Milo and I were both wearing overalls. My mother had on a denim dress with a red bandana tied around her ponytail, my father with a matching one around his neck, his arm looped around her shoulder. It was the most ridiculous picture of our family, and I’d always loved it.

  “This is adorable,” Lucinda said. “Look at that bowl haircut. You still have those overalls?”

  “Can we talk?” Instead of waiting for an answer, I walked down the hall and out the front door. Bugs zapped in the piss-yellow light from the front porch fixture. A large, fuzzy moth repeatedly battered itself against the dirty glass.

  The air was fully saturated, cars already covered in condensation. We stood close to my truck and I remembered the way she’d pushed me against it, how her hands felt on my skin.

  “This show cannot happen,” I said, crossing my arms so I wouldn’t try to touch her. “I mean it.”

  “That’s not very reasonable.” She leaned into me and rubbed her hands briskly up and down my arms, chafing the skin. “Also it’s pretty ballsy of you to ask for anything after bailing on me this morning.”

  “Stop it.” I put another foot of space between us. “That is my mother and there’s something wrong with her. It’s not okay.”

  “What do you want me to do? I can’t just tell her no. I’ve invested a lot of time and money.”

  I was sure she had, and probably a ton of it. Lucinda didn’t talk about it much, but I knew everything she owned was tied up in her condo and the gallery—a pretty significant chunk of change. What little I’d managed to uncover about her finances had come from rooting around her office while she was preoccupied with my mother’s work. There were always massive piles of mail stacked on the desk, mostly addressed to Lucinda Rex, but also some made out to a Donna Franklin. Her roommate, that word again that could’ve meant anything but likely meant partner. Maybe wife. A person Lucinda was probably sleeping with, sure, but it was also someone else investing in my mother’s work, who’d put money into it. Someone who might be able to see reason when it came to stopping this atrocity, if she had a little distance from it.

  And if I got a little more info on their relationship at the same time, even better.

  “What can I do?” she repeated. “What do you want from me?”

  “Figure something out.” I climbed inside the truck and started the engine. It took three tries to turn over, I was so stressed. When I backed out of the driveway, she was still standing there looking at me, her face glowing unrecognizable in the beams of the headlights.

  Driving straight to the bar, I drank until I was so drunk I couldn’t unbutton my pants in the bathroom. There were other women in there with me: a brassy blonde with a tattoo of a dolphin on her shoulder, an older woman who wore a sweatshirt with a Christmas wreath puffy-painted on the front. I wished I could be either of them, that I could trade bodies and go back to whatever their lives were so I could stop staying in mine. Husbands, children. Families that didn’t need so much care. I took a cab home and puked up everything I’d had to drink in my kitchen sink. When I woke the next morning, bleary and sick, I called Bastien and told him I was taking the day off.

  I spent my time at home sleeping, dreaming about my mother and Lucinda and Brynn, all mixed up in a strange sexual miasma. Vague, sticky figures cavorting with the animals my father and I had taxidermied: the bear, raccoons with small black paws that grabbed with scratchy fingers. I woke at dusk and stumbled into my living room. A steady stream of ants marched their way down the wall next to my head, following a crooked path into the kitchen. There were dishes piled up in the sink, crusted with food that had long ago fouled. The air was sour and thick with garbage.

  It had been only a day since we’d fought, but I couldn’t be alone in that apartment anymore without going crazy. I called Lucinda and asked her to meet me for drinks.

  We met up that night. Then we met up the next. I didn’t bring up what had happened at my mother’s house and neither did she, but it sat there between us, another of the unspoken hurts in my life that worked to rot something good from the inside out. It was all cadaver flesh. I refused to step foot in the gallery, unwilling to support it even by acknowledging it. Alone at home, I went online and looked up stuff about Lucinda. About her life before me, outside of what we had. I wasn’t very good at it—my brain didn’t like processing things on a screen; I was used to tactile work—but I knew enough to figure out she was married. Donna Franklin, I learned, was eight years older than Lucinda. Before they’d bought the gallery together, she’d lived in South Carolina and owned a woodworking business, one of the gayest professions I could imagine. There were some pictures of her when I googled further. I stared, wondering if we were a similar gay type. We shared a body shape, for sure, both of us stout with faces more likely to frown than grin. At the bottom of one of the outdated websites, I found contact information. A phone number. I wrote it down on a Post-it and kept it hidden inside an old magazine in my bedroom. There it sat, stuffed between the pages of a 1994 Better Homes and Gardens showcasing water features. Just in case.

  My relationship with Lucinda continued, but it wasn’t like before. We didn’t talk. There weren’t moments where sex verged on tenderness. We fucked against walls or on my ratty sofa; sometimes leaned over the coffee table or slammed against the sticky kitchen countertop. I knelt on the rug, pressing my face against her crotch until I thought she’d absorb me into her body.

  We never fucked in bed. I kept the door to my room closed and directed us anywhere else. The harder I pushed her away, the more often she called. I touched her like I wanted her to combust, exploding into pieces sharp enough to draw blood. Donna could take care of the intimacy I lacked, I thought. Donna with her short hair, Donna with those wide, strong hands, just like mine, Donna with her soft, dimpled baby face. What did it matter if Lucinda said she needed me? Someone who says she needs love when she’s really just looking for some on the side isn’t talking about romance; she’s talking about the demands of the body. The grunting sexuality of the physical. Well, let Donna keep her sweetness, I thought. Let Donna have her love, whatever the hell that meant. I could focus on the happy little deaths we inflicted on each other. I could have that, if nothing else.

  I took on more work at the shop, happy to let Bastien man the front. I slipped skins with relish, slicing and curing, my fingers clenched into the shape of the tools long after my shifts were done. When I got home, arms aching from the strain, there’d be globules of gristly muscle stuck to my clothes. I drank and slept hard; I didn’t want any more dreams.

  The shop was doing well. Bastien fielded marketing and added social media, something my father would never have done and which I barely understood. Our client base grew until we were pulling in a fair amount of work again. The old business was dying off, but we found new footing with a younger crowd that I’d never imagined would be interested in taxidermy. It was good money, though, and I didn’t care what they wanted. I never questioned any of it until a woman approached me one afternoon with a coupon.

  “Excuse me. I have one of these?” She waved a wrinkled paper in my face. “This is Morton’s, right?”

  She couldn�
�t have been more than twenty-two. She wore red corduroy shorts and a white middy blouse cropped above her navel. Not our usual kind of customer; those were always cranky men in their late fifties who talked at me, like they thought they could teach me something.

  “Yeah, that’s us, but we don’t have coupons.”

  The woman thrust the paper under my nose until I was forced to take it from her or inhale it. It was printed and the ink had smeared along the top edge, but there was our logo, smack on top: MORTON’S in all caps with the weird apostrophe that almost looked like a demonic tadpole.

  “I heard you might be getting in some peacocks?” she asked, as I shrugged and contemplated our ad, in print. New things happening in the store now, all the time.

  Bastien laughed and I turned to look at him, curious what was so funny. He never laughed unless someone fell down or made a joke about using the bathroom.

  “Later this week,” he told her, snagging the paper from my hands. “Gotta pick ’em up first.”

  Bastien and I grabbed Lolee on the way to get the birds. She spent most nights at her friend Kaitlyn’s house since my mother was always holed up at the gallery. Kaitlyn was a short girl with a bulldog face and a sweet smile. They played in the marching band together, both of them flutes. Lolee liked being over there, and I didn’t blame her. My mother was so busy that she’d stopped making regular meals. Last time I’d been in the house, every leftover was gone and there was nothing to eat but some questionable milk and half a box of stale cinnamon Life cereal.

  Bastien drove my truck down purpling streets while I drained my first beer of the night. It sat wedged between my knees. He flew into Kaitlyn’s driveway and my sip dribbled down my chin and soaked the collar of my shirt.

  “Where we headed?” I asked, cracking open another and wiping the condensation off on my jeans. “Is there a wholesale outlet? Never did one of those.”