by Kyra Wilder
The garbage was starting to smell but I didn’t mind it now. I liked it maybe and the mould from the lemons in the bowl puffed up into the air like green smoke if I touched them, just giving themselves up like that into nothing and I liked that too. Who is touching me, I didn’t think, didn’t ask the lemons, didn’t show them my arms, my face, my neck.
I thought, I should call M. I should tell him to come home, but I only thought it quietly. Besides, I had found it floating, my phone I mean, in the mop bucket, all soaked through and abandoned, its face gone blank and dead in the grey water. Now, I took the phone out of my pocket and set it in the crack between the guest-room door and the wall and crushed it slowly, using the door, just watching the screen bend, then feeling it give, feeling it break richly under the weight of my hands.
I curled up behind the bags as if they were some kind of fortress and closed my eyes. Click. Maybe I heard the lights in the apartment. Maybe there was someone at the door, but I was safe in the guest room behind the garbage. Maybe I was. I covered my eyes and lay still in my burrow as the hours passed and listened for the sounds of my children, ready to jump straight up if they needed me. I’m here, I’m here, I would shout if they asked for me. Don’t worry, I’ll always be right here with you.
17
The days folded together like a map crumpling in on itself, continents crashed, tectonic plates ground together like bad teeth, oceans dropped away to nothing. I made food for E, bits and pieces of things that got wilder as our cupboards were stripped down to their studs. We licked the food off our plates and stopped using forks and knives. Dried pasta we could crunch in our teeth. We painted our arms with the last of the bottled sauces and whooped at each other.
E began to look a bit pale, dark circles flowered beneath her eyes. I told her she was a garden inside a garden inside a garden and hugged her tight and close. She began keeping her animals in a box under her bed. She didn’t want me to play with them even though I offered. Let’s get out baby giraffe, I would say, let’s get him out and let him run around the tops of the curtains. He’s asleep, she said. Don’t wake him up. The others? Baby orangutan? They’re all asleep, she said. Every morning she woke up with more red marks. XOXO is for hugs and kisses. Bites mean I love you so much I’ll eat you up. There was an old owl who lived in an oak, whiskey, whaskey, weedle, I told her. And all the words he ever spoke were fiddle, faddle, feedle.
There was someone else, I was sure, in the apartment, making E’s bed, tending to her. When I went to check on her in the middle of the night her sheets were always tucked up perfectly tight, right underneath her chin. One morning I found all her clothes folded and put away, the corners of all her little shirts teased into sharp angles, looking like they’d all been pressed with an iron. Sometimes I thought I heard someone singing to B while he slept, sometimes I sort of startled awake and found it was me that was doing it, me that was singing.
At night, when the children were asleep, I thought about Nell. The banging on the window didn’t come again but I wondered, had it been her out there? Running away from something? Had she seen us jumping out of that window? Had she been looking for a window to jump into? Had she had her children with her? The baby? The boy? Had she left her shoes as a sign? Or had she been lifted up out of them? I could think about these things at night, in the dark, when I was waiting for the children to need me, biting at my nails and my fingers. Something about it just let my mind run and run but in the end all I could think about were the dusty eyes in the dark that came out when I closed the shutters, and how they, the eyes, looked so much like my own. What I’m trying to say is that sometimes there isn’t anywhere to skip to, only long hours that stretch like oil, glistening and sliding over the tops of all the stretching shadows.
There were so many flies now in the apartment that we all took to wearing long sleeves so we couldn’t feel their legs on our skin. B was sleeping so much. He was like a bear in winter I suppose. Such a good baby, sleeping and sleeping and sleeping in my arms. He was so light I almost never had to put him down, and we could dance for hours like two feathers, floating up and up, impervious to gravity and time.
We hid under the ruined sofa cushions. I stuffed my clothes with the feathers and the foam and made a scarecrow person. I made one too for E and a tiny little lumpy one for B. So that we could each have a scarecrow version of ourselves to sit next to and talk to. What’s three plus three? I asked E, pointing at the scarecrow family and then pointing at ourselves. What’s two plus four? I asked, sitting E down among the scarecrow people. See? Do you see how it stays the same no matter where you go?
There were so many things to do. Once E woke up with her hair braided into two gorgeous plaits, one on each side of her head. The braids glinted in her half-dark room like oil lamps, and we admired her hair in the bathroom together. How beautiful we are, I whispered to her. Look at us. But I wondered a bit, if I let myself, who had done the braiding.
I imagined rust growing on the outside of the metal shutters. We played with the light switches, flicking them fast on and off and on and off until they began burning out one by one. We loved the way they snapped and fizzed, the lights, when they burned out, the way the light flickered and grew huge and hectic just before it was gone. In the end we were left with only the candles and we set these up around the apartment, at the table, we ate at all hours by their light.
We pretended we lived in the woods. Or sometimes that we had gone to sleep and wouldn’t wake again for a hundred years. E wrote messages for me in the alphabet letters on the fridge and I would spend a long time at night trying to decode their mysteries, constellations of vowels and consonants that were so carefully arranged. Help me, I said to the letters. Really. Now. Really help me now. But of course I could never read them right and she was so many years away from learning how to spell.
E took to following me around the apartment, whispering, knock knock. The beginning of a joke. Only the first part though, she never said the rest. The game went on and on until I felt like a wound, gaping, food for invisible things. Knock knock, she said, over and over, as if there was no part of me that wouldn’t open if she asked. Maybe she just wanted to get outside. The games I played had to get better, brighter, much much much more fun. They had to keep us all happy, they had to keep us all inside. We painted the walls with a mixture of honey and flour and the last bit of glue E had from a bottle in her craft supplies bag. We painted this too on the walls in the bathroom and watched the flies get stuck.
But, more and more, E wasn’t asking about games and B was so sleepy he was barely even ever awake. Perhaps I should have called a doctor, or run out of the house down the street. We could still play though, so in a way, we were fine. B was quiet and we were quiet and quiet was good.
It was really night outside, that really dark kind of night that you can feel even with your eyes closed, even with the shutters on your windows shut tight. The kind of middle-of-the-night dark that touches your skin with its fingers all over and makes you shiver. That kind of dark. I’d tried to keep E awake as long as I could. Stay awake honey, stay awake baby, just one more game with Mommy, look we’ll be like this or this. We’ll be fawns and have a tea party under a tree, look at our hooves, our jam pies! Our hot mugs of tea! But she had said she was tired, that she felt sick, that she was hungry and couldn’t eat any more cold rice with syrup even though I told her a million times how delicious that kind of dinner was, how lucky she was to have it, how it could have been anything we imagined it to be.
Anyway she took her animals and went to bed, closed the door to her little room and shut me out. I thought about scratching at her door and saying I was a baby goat, asking her if I could crawl into bed with her for just a moment but I didn’t. It was really good and healthy if she wanted to be alone. It was amazing that she wasn’t afraid of the dark. More afraid of me I thought and had to break the thought with a quick hard laugh to make it not be true. How could she be afraid of me? We loved each other so much.
I loved her with a feeling that sometimes crushed my own lungs and made me not able to breathe.
I hovered at the edge of B’s crib to see if he would wake up and need me. B? I whispered so quietly. B? I whispered a bit louder but he was asleep and fine all by himself and so I was alone and then I wasn’t and then I was really afraid.
Right now, I thought, right now I am afraid. I’m not laughing. I’m not imagining that I’m afraid. I really am, right now, here, crouching between the crib and the rental-company sofa. Click. The light in the kitchen, the last one, clicked off and the apartment was dark like the inside of a mouth. Click. It came back on again but brighter than it had been. I shut my eyes. Dishes clinked in the kitchen like a breeze was running through the cupboards. I pressed my hands to the side of my face covering my ears. Maybe if I was still enough this would go away. I wanted to wake B. B! I would have screamed. E! But my mouth was shut down tight and I couldn’t make any sounds come out.
There were footsteps running in the kitchen, plates being set on the table, and cups and glasses as if I were listening to my own ghost setting out breakfast. As if I were dead and still trying to get the kids ready to go to the park, slicing cold cucumbers with my so-sharp knives. You can hear me. Said the voice that I couldn’t hear. Said the voice in a voice that I knew. Come out come out wherever you are. I felt myself going white with cold that wasn’t really cold. A cold that was deeper than cold, that started from inside me, from inside my bones. I was trembling. Soon I would start to shake so much that I would give myself away. I would lose myself to that feeling pulling now right over me, that feeling of being about to be found. If you go down to the woods today, the voice said, you’re sure of a big surprise. And I whispered back in my shaking voice, because of course I couldn’t help it, If you go down to the woods today you’d better go in disguise. And there was a delighted laugh that came from close by and the sound of two hands clapping quick together.
The terrible thing, I thought. The terrible thing.
The light clicked on in the little hall between the kitchen and the living room. The light so bright in the shell of the burned-out bulb that it was as if my eyes weren’t squeezed shut tight. As if I were thrown suddenly into the sun. I could smell the electricity. The burning. The lights clicked off. Nimble running steps, pattering like rain on the carpet, so soft and dancing. Slipping one way, then another. The light clicked on again. The light clicked off.
B snored a bit and moved his arm. Fell deeper and deeper into the deep cold ocean of sleep and dreams and being away when people need you. Help me.
For years, when I was little, when I wasn’t little anymore, I felt my way to the bathroom at night, refusing to open my eyes in the dark. As long as I kept my eyes closed I was safe. I would have one more second before I knew, and this was worth all the bruises on my shins, even once a broken toe. This was worth it, the not knowing. The refusing to.
Any second the light would click on in the living room and there I would be and not asleep. If only I had been asleep I would have been safe, of this I was certain, but I wasn’t. Perhaps I would have to act first. Jump up, scream, make a noise loud enough to surprise it. Roar at it maybe, roar it away from me fast and now.
Click. The light came on. I leapt up from behind the crib screaming, my chest heaving, the breath not behaving in my throat, and there I was. Another me, smiling. What I’m trying to tell you is that I was right there in front of me, wearing my long brown coat. My hair was done up nicely. I even had a little make up on. I was standing there smiling in the smoking burning light. What I’m trying to tell you is that the red lips framing her teeth were mine. I grabbed the baby, thank God I did. Thank God I thought to grab him. He didn’t wake, he was hot and limp against my shoulder. The me across the room frowned a little and then I ran and the me that didn’t have the baby took one second to realize that I was running and I used that second to throw open the door to E’s room and grab her too out of the dark and then I was running for the door and I would never make it and who was to say anyway that making it to the door would mean we would be safe. Who was there really that could say that?
There was a burning smell that became stronger as I ran down the hallway, and the heat in the apartment suddenly rose like hands against my face, pushing me back. I wrapped us all in my arms and ran down the hallway, with me, the other me, I knew, coming after. We were both just as fast as each other.
Stop, I heard her say, in my voice exactly. Stop. What are you doing? And there was fear in her voice, which of course was mine, a wild fear that I hadn’t expected. Give them back to me, she said. Then there was smoke and real flames and my hand grabbed the door handle and it was so hot that my skin smoked and stuck to it. The apartment was on fire. There was real fire all around us, eating everything up. The apartment was on fire and all the locks were done up tight.
I ripped at the bolts, at the smoking chain, I felt the skin of my hand give way under the heat and then I didn’t feel it. I grabbed the handle and pushed and we fell through the door and out of the apartment and out and out and out into the hallway outside. I slammed the door behind us savagely, and I heard her scream. I mean I heard her scream my scream, scream the way that I would have, long and with exactly my voice. She screamed the names of the children, of course she did. I would have.
A woman came running towards us down the hallway with a scratchy woollen blanket. She tried to take E and B from me but I wouldn’t let her, my arms were locked that hard around them, so instead she held the blanket around us all together and walked us outside and to an ambulance waiting in the car park, saying things I couldn’t understand in a soothing voice. We were safe she could have been saying, we were the ones that were safe.
18
E and B and I were tucked into the back of an ambulance and driven away. At the hospital, nurses peeled E and B off me gently. I was told that B was dehydrated, that he was sick, was perhaps quite ill, but would recover. That they had both inhaled a lot of smoke. My hand was the only thing keeping me there, nailing me into the room I mean. The pain in my hand was a white line so bright it stopped my thoughts. The nurses wrapped it in cling film and then in gauze. It was better not to look at it.
After my hand was taken care of, to the extent that it could be, I found B and E in beds next to each other, each fitted with little plastic masks that were held tight against their mouths with soft elastic bands. Miles and miles of plastic tubes wrapped around them like fishing lines that would pull them back to shore, to me, into my arms.
They looked so dirty in the clean hospital sheets. Their faces were smudged and crusted with old dinners and who knew what else. E’s hair was tangled, it looked exactly like a cloud of flies swarming around her face. What must we look like out here, I thought, and I wished for just one second that we were back inside the apartment where no one could see us. The red marks it turned out were only lipstick, were and had been only kisses after all. The nurses wiped them all away, all the kisses all the red layers of them, coaxing the new clean skin out into the bright hospital lights.
I was given a chair to sit on and this I positioned exactly equidistant between the two beds. I promised myself that I would leap up at any moment where leaping was necessary. B was asleep but it was a better kind of sleep now, a safe-at-last kind of sleep and not the kind of sleep he had been sleeping before. I put my bandaged hand near him on the bed and felt better. E looked severely at me as she almost always did, but took my other hand and held it as she drifted off too amid the beeps and bright lights. In her other hand she clutched her giraffe, another lone survivor. We were here, here we were.
A nurse brought me a thermos of tea and I drank it while she set up a cot against the opposite wall. She had blonde hair and a round sort of body a bit like a wheelbarrow, sort of blunt and tottering but perfect anyway for getting from place to place. I felt myself moved onto the cot. Perhaps she just scooped me up. Maybe she said something to me just then, maybe she told me I was a good mother. M
aybe she told me I could rest now, that the machines would keep a better watch over B, over E anyway, that I could sleep and sleep and sleep and only wake up when I chose to. Maybe she was just asking for my insurance card.
In the morning we woke up and were cared for, a thermos of fennel tea for me, apricot juice for E, thick and as orange as a duck’s foot. A nurse came in to wash B, plunking him in and out of a small portable tub filled with soapy water while I watched and held his hand. I showered and washed myself as best I could with the tiny hospital soap. Afterwards I was exhausted and slept again. E played all the time with her giraffe.
Mostly we waited for the hours to pass, but in an easy way. I nursed B off and on almost all day, at the encouragement of many friendly nurses. We were doing everything right, they might have been saying. We would all love each other for ever and could stay as long as we liked. E and I ate steak for dinner and for me a nurse brought a tiny glass of wine. At night we slept. For days we lived like babies, the three of us, eating, sleeping, being taken care of by inexplicable giants, until M came and found us.
There you are, he said when he walked into the room, smelling like ocean water, like he had just stepped off a plane from a sunny place and maybe he had.
He picked up E and hugged her and she let him hug her giraffe too. He picked up B then and hugged him and then he came and put his arms around me even though he still had E and B and her giraffe in his arms. Jesus, he said into my shoulder, you sure know how to scare a guy.
He let us go and wiped his eyes.
I got here as soon as I could, he said. I came as soon as I heard. You should see it, he said, the apartment building. The whole thing’s gutted, completely burned.
How did it happen? I asked without knowing really what I was asking.