Where No Gods Came

by Sheila O'Connor

  “Well, Faina, you can check out three books while your card is being processed. Do you want to look around for one more before we finish?”

  “No.” I only check out one a week, one I can finish quickly, so every Thursday, Lenore will let me come back.

  “Sign here.” She points to a narrow rectangle with a large black X. “Use your best penmanship. It's a permanent record.”

  Faina McCoy, I write. And for the first time, I realize I live here.

  Evenings, I save the cherry cobbler from my TV dinner and pass her the cooled tray. A fresh glass of vodka sweats on the bedside table. “Move the fan closer to the bed,” she says. When I read Little Women aloud my voice wobbles in the wind. “Try to read with expression,” she tells me.

  We keep a box of Kleenex propped between us. In her deepest sadness, she forgets to correct my pronunciation.

  “Someday you'll know what it's like to lose somebody,” she says, closing her eyes as if she can see that person's face on the dark screen of memory. “When Papa Roy died, I sat at his grave and bawled like a baby. I was nearly crazy with grief. He was the only one who had ever loved me. It's strange to be someone with just one person in the world. But that's how your heart is like mine, little Faina. Because I know you're your daddy's girl. Always will be.”

  I nod, swallow down the new lump in my throat. I know she is off on that peculiar road of recollection, and when she starts in on Papa Roy and how much she misses him, I always end up walking my own path.

  She gulps down the last of her last nightcap. “I've got to have another to make it through this heat.”

  I lift the hair off the base of my neck, turn to let the breeze of the fan cool my spine. My shirt is a layer of wet skin. “Do you think I should finish reading first?”

  “I've had enough tonight. Mix me a fresh one, and we'll come back to it tomorrow. I think I'm going to pass out from this humidity.”

  I try to make the next one weak, but she catches me, sends me back for another shot. “Grab me a book of matches while you're at it,” she calls. Every night, as I pour the last glass of vodka, I think: What if I wake in the morning to her dead, face down in the hallway, a pool of vomit under her cheek?

  After I've given her a fresh drink, I flap her bed sheets to let in a last breath of air, shut off her light. “Don't read ahead of me,” she says, giving my hand a feeble squeeze.

  “Be careful of the tenants in this building. They'll try to trick you with their questions.” This is my drill every day, before I'm allowed to go outside. “I don't want them to know you're my daughter. You're just visiting. It's none of their damn business.”

  I understand why she doesn't want to explain me, the daughter from California, the daughter they've never seen. Mornings, when I go downstairs for Lenore's marmalade twists, the woman at the bakery asks all the questions. What did you say your name was again? Never heard of such a thing. Where are you from? How long are you staying? Why don't we ever see Lenore anymore? Or Cammy? “Can't be much fun up there for a girl your age,” she says, slipping the twists into a white bag. “I'm sure you know what I mean.” Every day she waits for me to reveal the truth, pausing too long before she passes over the bag.

  “Good girl,” Lenore says. “Let them guess. Families deserve their privacy. That Frances is an old bitch. She's been watching me for years. But the one to steer clear of is Hank of Hank's Plumbing. He's the caretaker of this building.”

  When I meet Hank in the alley, I know it's him because his name is stitched into the pocket of his blue uniform. Before I can get in the back door, his hairy hand is on my elbow. “You that little girl living up with Lenore?” He clenches a toothpick between his teeth, narrows his eyes at me. “Come here, I got something to show you.”

  “I'm late,” I say, trying to step past him. I don't like his gravelly voice, or the snake tattoo on his dirty arm.

  “Won't take but a minute.” He clutches my elbow, shoves me through the gray steel door that leads to the basement—a place Lenore has forbidden me to go. At the bottom of the dark stairwell, he jingles his ring of keys, struggles with the padlock, then flips back the latch. He kicks the door with the toe of his heavy black boot, then shoves me into the storage room: a row of tall wooden lockers, a laundry tub, an antique washing machine. It's musty and cold, concrete blocks covered with gauzy webs.

  “There,” he says, pointing to a broken window.

  “I've got to go.”

  He tightens his grip on my arm. “What's your hurry?” Hank smells like the garage at my dad's marina, oil and metal. “You tell Lenore I'll add that window to her rent.” He steps on the shards of glass, points to a patchwork quilt heaped in a corner. “Tell her that kid of hers has been here.”

  “Cammy?”

  “She got any more?” He winks at me. “You tell her to put it in her August check. You've seen the evidence.”

  “Okay,” I say, but he won't let go of my arm.

  “One more thing, Fina McCoy,” he says, pulling an envelope out of his back pocket and handing it to me. My card from the Minneapolis Public Library. “Any chance this belongs to you?”

  When I tell Lenore about Hank and the basement, I leave out the part about my library card. I don't want to add it to the broken window, I don't want her to know I told the librarian the truth, and now Hank knows my name.

  “Let that bastard charge me. Close my door now, Faina. I need some sleep.”

  Out in the kitchen, I sweep the floor, scrub the sink, polish the top of her turquoise stove. When she wakes up again, I want her to be happy. I don't ask questions, because I know if I do, she'll close the door on our conversation. But if I wait quietly, she might offer a story.

  In the evening, I help her out to the sink for her hair washing. She drapes a towel around her shoulders, positions her head under the kitchen faucet. “Check the temperature,” she tells me, as I get ready to spray her with the black rubber hose.

  I work the Prell shampoo into a lathery wig, stare at Lenore's spine, a narrow path of stones poking through her nightgown. The sack of skin on her arms flutters like a flag. “I love having someone else wash my hair. It reminds me of the beauty parlor.”

  When I'm finished, she wrings out a thin trickle of water.

  “I always feel better clean.”

  After the white towel is wrapped around her head like a turban, she sits at the kitchen table munching cashews. In the chair, she shrinks into a small child, her bare feet dangling above the floor, her lower lip puffed out in a pout. I stand behind her, carefully creeping the comb through her thin wet hair. “Ouch,” she screams, when I tug or touch the teeth to her tender scalp. “Remember, I'm sensitive.” She reaches up and rubs her wet head. I divide Lenore's hair into perfect rows, streak setting gel through each damp section before slowly rolling it onto the prickly black curler. She gives me directions, passes me back the pins. “Let's do the rest of this in bed,” she says suddenly. “I'm wiped out already.”

  When I've settled her into her bed, finished pinning down the last black curler, she turns her attention to me. “We ought to do something with your hair,” she says. “It's so thin and straight; you could at least tie it back in a braid.”

  She makes me turn my back to her, so she can begin to weave together three long strands. “I used to love to do this to Cammy, when she was young,” Lenore says. “It's relaxing. Of course, she was better at taking care of herself. You're what we called a tomboy in my day. I'm sure it comes from living with Bobby. But you're getting to the age where you're going to want boys to sit up and take notice.”

  “I don't care about boys.”

  “Oh, that will change.”

  “Not for me,” I insist.

  “Plenty of girls are late bloomers. But you'll need a husband someday. I can still remember my mother telling me that. All the sons of her bridge-club cronies she invited over to meet me. Lemonade and egg-salad finger sandwiches served in the gazebo. But I wanted to go to college.”


  “Is that how you met my dad?” I ask.

  Lenore pauses, balances the three strands in her still hands. Her sigh is long and slow, nearly as heavy as the heat on this July night. I hold my breath, wait patiently. If I'm silent, there's a chance the truth might come.

  “Well, what did Bobby tell you? About us, I mean.”

  “Nothing. He's never told me anything.”

  She's quiet again, considering whether or not to go on. “Well, I'm sure he has his own story.”

  “Is the braid done?” I ask, reaching my hand back to feel her progress. “You can skip it if you want.”

  “No, no. You've got to get it out of your eyes.” She picks up the rhythm again, gently tugging and weaving. “This is girl talk, I guess. I met Bobby at the Bryant Garage; he was fixing the brakes on Papa Roy's Cadillac. ‘Hey, good-looking,’ he said, when I came to drive it home. He seemed so bold, reckless. Nothing like the Kenwood boys I'd known all my life. Then, too, he was dark like you, black-eyed like a deer, twenty-two and already out of the Navy. Some strange mix of Romanian and Irish. I was typical sixteen. I went out with him to punish my parents. Especially my mother. Papa Roy hated him, but then, he hated all my dates because I was his sweetheart, his daughter, and it made him jealous to see me go off with boys.”

  “How long did you date before you got married?”

  “Who keeps track? A couple of months, I guess. Not long enough, but I was a girl who didn't know how to wait. Papa Roy hosted an extravagant wedding for me at Kenwood Methodist. Not long after that, I had Cammy. I've probably said too much already, but there was never real love between us. I was Papa Roy's girl; that wasn't easy for a man to get past. And your father was from a lower class. He was too proud to take Papa Roy's money; he preferred to live like common poor. Of course, my mother was gloriously happy. She had Papa to herself, and the chance to see me suffer. She was right; I never made it to college.”

  She loops the rubber band around the end of my hair. “All finished,” she announces, patting my back.

  “Then how long were you married before you had me?”

  “How'd we get on this subject in the first place?” she asks, settling back on her pillow and passing me her empty glass. “Put in an extra cube this time, sweetie. Let's forget all this talk. It's ancient history.”

  Lenore - Ancient History

  I can set the record straight. Tell you my ancient history. But it's a truth I would never want Faina to know.

  Cammy and I were happy during those first few years. Bobby was gone all the time down at the garage, weekends hunting or fishing with his buddies near Moose Lake, poker games. From the start, Cammy was good company. I told her the worst of it. The phone numbers I found scribbled on little slips of paper, the nights he never came home, the crimson chiffon scarf I found in his coat pocket. Even as a toddler, she understood. She was born old.

  We played games. “Shh,” I'd say when we heard the doorknob turn. “It's Bobby. Let's pretend we're invisible.” It was great fun, the two of us hiding in the closet until we heard him give up and leave. Then we'd creep out giggling and clapping.

  I don't know what happened then. Papa Roy dragged me to doctors, but as usual they couldn't diagnose it. My whole body started sparking with electrical shocks. At night, my fingers and feet would tingle until I numbed them under icy water. Out of heavy sleep, I woke shivering. In the day, my mouth was a cave of sponge, my tongue sluggish and sticky.

  “Get out of the house,” Papa Roy said to me. “You're twenty-one years old, and you live like you're forty. I'll teach you my business. Learn it now. It'll be yours when I die.”

  Papa Roy owned so many things; he gave me the cleaners on Nicollet. I thought we would run it together, but Papa Roy handed it over to me like car keys. I hardly saw him; Mother told me he had a mistress named Gloria, a girl not much older than me he'd met at the Palomino Club. So Gloria had Papa Roy, and I had his cleaners: the chemicals, the customers' orders, the little white buttons I sewed on the businessmen's shirts.

  Jess ran the press. He showed me the ropes, mixed the solutions, sorted through the clothes. He was a good-looking guy with thick lips, freckles, a forest of red hair. But he had this limp from a bullet he caught in Korea. “Jess,” I said one day while watching the sweat streak down his back. “I think you're crazy about me.”

  Jess dropped his head into his hands and started laughing. “Jess,” I said. “Admit it.” But he was a decent guy, he knew I was married.

  I blame this all on Papa Roy and Bobby. The men who had forsaken me.

  Finally one night, we closed the cleaners at six, drew the shades over the front windows, and made love in the back room. I touched his scar, kissed it with my lips. “Jess,” I whispered at the end. “I want you to marry me.” I saw the three of us—Jess, me, Cammy—living happily ever after in a white colonial overlooking Lake of the Isles. I knew Papa Roy would buy it for me.

  That night, for punishment, I seduced Bobby. I'd slept in Cammy's room for years to keep him away from me. But I went into his bedroom, woke him from a drunken sleep. I hoped he could sense Jess inside me; I wanted to give him a hint how it hurt.

  Not long afterward, Jess left for a job at his brother's restaurant in Lincoln. Nine months later, Bobby named her Faina, after his mother, who'd died sometime that year. A strange name. But what did it matter to me?

  I couldn't love her. She cried all the time; even in the hospital, the nurses said she would be a handful, stubborn, wrenching her face away from the bottle. All day she screamed, while Cammy crouched on the floor coloring, her sweet pictures ruined by Faina's gut-splitting shrieks. There wasn't even time for Cammy to curl up in my lap. I walked Faina constantly, jiggled her until her head bobbed like a dashboard ornament. I wanted my old life back: the cleaners, lazy mornings with Cammy, making love with Jess in the back room.

  Bobby? I forgot about Bobby. He slept late in the mornings; nights he tended bar at a strip place down on Washington Avenue—Zorba's. Papa Roy offered to have him killed; he knew some people then who could do that kind of thing. I was too indifferent to want him dead.

  Occasionally, Mother stopped by to remind me of how I had ruined my life. She spoiled Cammy, bought her ice-cream cones, dolls, bags of candy corn. When I asked her to hold Faina, she swallowed Cammy in her arms. “Ah, ah. Be careful of sibling rivalry.”

  No one wanted Faina. Not Papa Roy. Not Bobby. Not Cammy. Not even me.

  “Why don't we leave Faina to live with Bobby?” Cammy said one night while I was rubbing soap over her perfect back. She was nearly five, old enough to know what she'd said. The words dropped from her mouth like stones, slid through the bath water and thumped on the bottom of the tub.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “You're sure you want to leave Faina and Bobby?” I didn't want Cammy to look back, and hold the decision against me.

  “Sure,” she said.

  I packed the little that belonged to us. I thought we'd catch a bus to Nebraska. People didn't just fly in those days. I didn't even tell Papa Roy good-bye. Why should I? He was too busy with Gloria to bother with me.

  When Bobby came home, Faina was asleep in the other room, her troubled body in the bassinet next to his bed. I took Cammy's hand in mine and said, “We're leaving.”

  He didn't say “So long,” he didn't ask where, he didn't even bend over to kiss Cammy. Maybe he thought it was temporary. He thought he was off the hook, dumping the three of us like rotten fruit. I didn't mention Faina was in the other room, and he didn't ask about her. I think he'd forgotten he had another daughter. That's how little he was in our lives.

  For years, I relished the terror he must have felt when he heard her first scream and discovered he was stuck with her. Stuck. Like me.

  Hi Honey,

  I know it's later than I promised, but if you saw the scene here, you'd know there isn't much time to scratch off a letter. And I'm not exactly a writer. Don't pretend to be either.

  Are things O.K. the
re with Lenore? Tell her the cash is coming, it'll take awhile for me to get it all worked out. God knows she doesn't need the money. Her old man was loaded. I'm sure he left her plenty. Jesus, look at the way we've scrambled through the years. Did you hit it off with Cammy? I always thought it'd do you good to get to know your sister, your mother, too, for that matter. Well, here's your chance. I'm sure Cammy will show you the ropes, teach you to work the system—Lenore, school, Minn. Not exactly San Diego, is it?

  Well, it's hot as hell here in the Indian Ocean. I cut the sleeves off my shirts just to survive the sun. This rig's so far out in the middle of nowhere, they fly us in by helicopter. Just water. Not another goddamn thing. The work is hard labor, prison would have been a vacation. I'm roughnecking, that means I'm on the drill floor. Too much to explain. Twelve hours a day of torture. Takes a whole shift to change a worn-out bit. Wiley got the easy gig working on the generators. No wonder he conned me into coming. I wish to god he'd told me what I was in for.

  There's not a whole lot to report here. Can't write on my shift, no time. We drop into bed dead tired. Eat. Sleep. Work. Can't even get a cold beer. Guess they're afraid we'll get tanked up and kill each other.

  Here's a card with the address of the co. office in Perth. We can get our mail there on our big week of freedom. Two on, one off. (Helicopter to Barrow Island, prop plane to Onslow, fly to Perth. Get it now? Way the hell out.) We're splitting a house in Perth with some other guys, hotbunking. It's not a palace, but the price is right. Remember that I love you. Dad

  Cammy - Missing

  That summer, Tony was driving it up from a farm in Wisconsin. We could make a hundred bucks easy, just selling it to punks on the street. We were living high. Happy. I didn't think of going back.

  Tony gave me a home in his basement place off Park Avenue. It wasn't much, but it kept back the heat. Days we slept stoned for free. At night, we hung out on the streets.