by Paige Clark
I scroll to a photograph the bride sent to me. In it, my ex-boyfriend’s hand is lower on my back than it should be. My eyes are small moons. Things are often more and less than how I remember them.
‘It smells like death in here,’ Missy says and I don’t disagree.
I search her apartment for a candle to light and I find three glass Santería candles—one for fast luck, one for love, one for health. Missy lights the candle for fast luck, I light the one for love; who cares about health. The love candle is decorated with the words Follow me and a hummingbird with hearts where there should be eyes. ‘Follow me, follow me,’ I say, but my phone doesn’t ring.
I tell Missy my ex-boyfriend never forgot to call. I try to explain the sound of his voice over the phone, how everything he knows comes out like a question.
‘What did you talk about?’ she asks. She suspects he is boring. She suspects this of everyone. I go quiet and don’t explain his laugh, breathless as a child blowing out his birthday candles.
Missy changes the subject to the one who got away. He is not the reason why now I give her a painkiller and a glass of water. He is a man she never met. The night of her mother’s fourth wedding, to an American entrepreneur, she slept with her new stepbrother in the lobby of a New York City hotel. She woke up in the morning naked underneath a hotel robe. She found out later from the concierge it was the night shift bellboy who had covered her in her sleep. By the time Missy looked for him to say thank you, his shift was over. ‘I wonder if Jaspar would have liked him,’ she says.
‘He would have loved him,’ I say.
Missy and I, we’re superstitious, but we’re also sentimental. Missy keeps Jaspar’s water bowl on the back porch filled. I keep a note my ex-boyfriend gave me, the paper worn smooth between my fingers. Missy keeps her ultrasound in her sock drawer. I didn’t mean to find it there.
There are stories I save too. My ex-boyfriend was the first person to ever take me to the ocean. Sceptics wonder why you can’t see the Earth curve from the beach. But I took one look at the horizon and buried my toes in the sand to hold on.
I tell Missy it’s hard for me to be happy, don’t ask me why.
‘My love,’ she says, ‘wait until the stars align.’
I do not remind her how quickly she lit the fast luck candle, her eyes flickering with the flame. Instead I say, ‘When my moon is in Venus.’
‘Exactly,’ she says.
So, I leave out the part where for Christmas my ex-boyfriend made me Monopoly money with his photograph in the place of Mr Moneybags’ picture. We went out to a fancy dinner and my ex-boyfriend handed the waiter his credit card to fix up the bill. The waiter declined his card and said, ‘Your money is no good here!’, then showed us both the currency they accepted, my ex-boyfriend’s face beaming from a marigold five-hundred-dollar-note. He’d choreographed the whole thing. I paid with the Monopoly money I had but shorted the cheque by a blue fifty. I tucked it into my wallet for later.
I make Missy a cup of tea and watch her gulp it down. I follow her eyes as they scan the bottom of the cup for patterns. She looks for meaning in everything.
‘Missy,’ I ask, ‘can you see the future?’
‘Not from here,’ she says.
In Missy’s favourite photograph of Jaspar, he is holding two chew toys in his mouth, a third at his feet. There is a string of drool suspended in mid-air. Missy can’t bear to look at my favourite, a photo of Jaspar as a puppy cradled in her hand. His black fur shines. His eyes are not yet open.
Missy shows me pictures on her phone of when she was a kid. There is one from her fourth birthday party. Her mother’s second husband has his arm around her as she glares at a cake decorated to look like a swimming pool. ‘I refused to blow out the candles,’ she says. ‘My mother kept begging, shrieking, the guests at the pool party will drown! I wish I’d said let them.’
There is one of her father holding Missy as a baby, mid-cry. Her father’s face is unremarkable. ‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘I can’t even remember his name.’
We are starving, so I order Chinese food. I ask for extra fortune cookies. We need as much luck as we can get.
‘Remember,’ Missy says, ‘it only comes true if you eat the whole cookie.’
‘And if you keep the fortune,’ I say.
The deliveryman calls me for directions and it is the first time my phone rings in days. Missy and I sit at opposite ends of her couch, eating straight from the takeaway boxes and watching TV. An ad comes on for pet food, the one where the animals’ mouths move along to a funny jingle.
‘The chicken is spicy,’ Missy says. ‘It’s making my eyes water.’
‘It’s not so bad,’ I say.
I think of Jaspar, cradled in her hand. I think of the guests at the pool party, drowning in rainbow wax. I think of the candles, still lit. Follow me, follow me, I think.
My first fortune reads, A wise lumberjack always carries a sharp saw. I eat the cookie and discard the proverb.
Missy’s first reads, An agreeable romance might begin to take on the appearance. ‘The bellboy!’ she says.
The bellboys at the hotel wore velvet coats with yellow-tasselled epaulettes. They wore caps with medallions stitched on the front. She imagines the colour of her bellboy’s hair, his eyes. She wonders if he blushed when he covered her with the hotel robe. ‘Did he steal it from a guest’s room?’ she asks.
‘And why not a blanket?’
Her next cookie reads, A light heart carries you through all the hard times. She discards the cookie, smashing it between her fingers. ‘That’s not a fortune,’ she says. ‘That’s a fact.’
Mine reads, Your dearest wish will come true. I slip it into my pocket. When Missy asks me to read it to her, I say it was blank. ‘That’s good luck,’ she says. I eat every crumb, licking my finger and running it across the plastic wrapper.
I don’t believe in fate, but I do believe in fortune, especially when it’s a cookie.
Missy falls asleep on the couch. The pet food ad comes on again and I change the channel. I rub my fortune between my fingers. Soon it will be worn smooth. The flames of the candles burn low. I wonder whose will go out first.
There is a story I want to tell Missy but I can’t. It begins at a wedding, my ex-boyfriend’s hand too low on my back. It begins on a beach day, when I can’t make out where the world ends. It begins with Christmas presents, what was given and what was not.
It ends like this—on New Year’s Eve, on the balcony of his apartment, with another man. I won’t stay long enough to find out if I leave a bruise.
Missy is sleeping, so I walk around the corner to the bottle shop. I drift through the aisles thumbing the wine labels—the embossed lettering and recycled paper—and examining the pictures. There is a shiraz with a five-legged dog on a ladder. There is a grenache with a tarot card ornamented with skulls and a giant serpent.
I decide to buy both. At the checkout, I give the cashier a wad of bills, focusing on his nose—slightly crooked. He says, ‘I can’t take this, love,’ and hands me back the counterfeit note. I examine it and my eyes lock with my ex-boyfriend’s, miniature and paper blue.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I hear myself say.
When I get back to the apartment, Missy is waiting for me.
‘I messed up,’ I say.
‘Tell me everything,’ she says.
I pour us each a glass of wine.
I tell her I kissed the man on the balcony. How he had an unremarkable face. I tell her my lipstick stained the stranger’s mouth so it resembled a wound.
She tells me her stepbrother tasted like wedding cake. How she still checks her sock drawer for Jaspar’s present. She doesn’t like what she finds there instead.
‘What can a person forgive?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. She does not mention my horoscope.
I pour both of us another glass of wine and another. We crawl into her bed with the second bottle, passing it between us. At the e
dge of the world, what you can see is the sky. Sometimes, you can even see Mars. I tell Missy that at the beach the waves pull your body towards the moon. I dig my toes into the covers, pretend they are made of sand.
We finish the second bottle. I wrap my arms around my friend, resting my hands on the exact right part of her back. Our teeth are stained, our cheeks are flushed, but we are laughing—drunk and rich with fortune.
WHAT WE DESERVE
When Rosa was a young woman, she stole a car and sold it for cash. Now, at an age a number of fingers past eighty, the specifics of the crime were lost on her. Though she never felt they were worth retelling, even in the afterglow of the event when, every so often, pleasure or fear would rise in her throat. When she was sure she would not be found out—and she was sure within a few days of her felony—she did not wish to hash it out or repent, not even to her boyfriend at the time, who would eventually become husband number one. Not even to her daughter, who asked her point blank decades later, when she was listing Rosa’s house to sell, how she had been able to attend their family home in the first place.
She had once, some ten years afterwards, found herself in a cathedral in San Francisco while on holiday and been tempted to confess to a priest. But the cathedral was Episcopalian—who knew Episcopalians made cathedrals?—so there was no confession and no penance. The church was shadowy and smelt of tourists. She paid money into an empty donation box to light a candle for her father, who had recently passed away. This was before the travel bans, when tourists from across the globe still visited the church, their chalky kneecaps exposed beneath posh hiking shorts. These tourists lit wick after wick without donating. Rosa, at least, had paid for her prayer and dressed appropriately for a church. She was wearing gold earrings with many carats and a silk slip dress. She stepped out of the cathedral onto California Street. That was what it really was named. Her father had intended to come to this city before he moved to Australia by accident instead. Her hair came undone in the wind. Streetcars rushed by.
That Rosa lived a lifetime ago. The present one lived here, in an aged-care facility paid for by her daughter. Rosa had moved in shortly after her second husband died from the flu. Her daughter, not wanting to take any risks, picked the facility based on its incomparable biosecurity record. Doors locked automatically. Visitors were allowed infrequently, their temperatures checked before being shuffled into brightly lit meeting rooms with acrylic sneeze screens and unarmed guards in military-grade gas masks. The carers wore patterned hazmat suits with comical jungle animal and gaudy holiday themes prints. Rosa knew each of the carers by the tilt of their eyes from behind a mask, by their gait, by the way their hazmat suit either hung off their frame like loose skin or clung to their spreading thighs and soft bottoms.
Her favourite, Lucy, was looking in on her now. She was a stick insect of a woman with kindly alien eyes. She pulled down her mask and grinned at Rosa. Her teeth were small and shiny.
‘Don’t get yourself into trouble on my account,’ Rosa said.
‘You’re going to dob me in?’ Lucy said. ‘You’re going to be the undoing of me? It’s you, Rosa girl, isn’t it!’ Then Lucy tickled Rosa with gloved fingers, all wrinkly overcooked sausages. They both screamed with laughter, even though Rosa was genuinely frightened of the fingers, each in its own baggy casing.
This, Rosa thought as Lucy left her room, was the closest Lucy would ever come to breaking the law.
The man Rosa stole the car from was her father. As a teenager, Rosa had never been tempted to steal—even when her friends nicked nail polish and novelty silver bracelets that stained their wrists. The opportunity to steal her father’s car had presented itself and she simply weighed the risks and the rewards. Part of her believed her father deserved it. Plus, the money she made from the business with the car allowed her the life she had. It wasn’t just a down payment on a house, though it was that too.
More than her crime, Rosa regretted her relationship with her daughter, Stella. Other mothers had found it easy, or pretended to find it easy, to be doting, to recall with cold clarity occasions in their children’s lives—specific Christmas tantrums, bad unfunny haircuts, cruel juvenile friends. Rosa talked about this shortcoming ad nauseam to her friends at the facility—two women called the twins, though they were not even sisters. The twins looked alike enough, both insignificant and shrivelled in matching wheelchairs that belonged to the home. But when they spoke to each other, which was often, it was impossible to tell one twin apart from the other. The timbres of their voices were indistinguishable, so their histories blurred into one, until not even they could keep straight who had lived through what. Though one twin’s life was marked by tragedy and the other twin’s life was remarkably spotless, their shared life seemed as ordinary as any other. Rosa did not feel left out. Their inability to be told apart made Rosa, who nobody ever forgot, feel celestial. It was this standing apart that condemned her to be a bad mother, she lamented to the twins. They agreed sorrowfully, their matching voices in consensus.
When Rosa was a young mother, she had imagined terrible things happening to her daughter. First, she thought Stella would be molested by the art teacher at school. She pictured this so vividly she could see the woman’s fleshy fist approach her daughter’s pristine pink vulva. Next, she convinced herself that Stella would be hit by a car on her tenth birthday, not with sufficient impact to kill her but with sufficient impact to leave her maimed, unattractive and unintelligible. Rosa had tepid fears too—some of which came true—that her daughter would marry a foreigner or move far away. Rosa was a product of foreigners, though they were the less foreign kind. In the end, Stella married an Asian but only moved a few suburbs away. Still, she all but locked Rosa up, so Rosa might as well have been in San Francisco, or somewhere else the daughter was no longer allowed to visit. She was not allowed to visit freely, the daughter said on the phone. By ‘not allowed’, she meant busy. After all, she could come as freely as she liked to the perspex-divided visiting room. Though their last encounter had gone badly. Her daughter looked older than she should have and often asked ‘What?’ loudly as if she couldn’t hear Rosa through the glass. Stella wore her hair in an unfashionable frizz and dressed in clothes in unflattering royal tones. Even from inside, Rosa knew fashionable women weren’t wearing maroon.
After Lucy left, Stella called on the phone. ‘Mother,’ she said. She used this word often, much to Rosa’s dismay.
‘The twins, their husband died of cancer and then their husband died peacefully in his sleep,’ Rosa said.
‘What are you talking about?’
Rosa could not, over the phone, explain their alikeness.
‘Not all old people look alike, Mother,’ Stella said. ‘All Asians don’t look alike either, for that matter.’
‘Eli is ugly in his own unique way,’ she replied. She was referring to the daughter’s husband, who looked to Rosa like all of the other diminutive men Stella brought home, no matter the race. Her daughter had a type—men easily cowed by her bullish good looks and lack of taste. Her toughness. Perhaps it was a result of having a mother like Rosa, who had been feeble with men her entire life, vain and selfish.
Rosa’s father was younger than she was now when he died. The year Rosa was his terminal age, she’d had a premonition that she would be struck with a cricket bat and perish instantaneously. The entire year passed without event. She did not think of her father as being a young man when he died, though to some he was. He was in his early fifties. To Rosa, he was old and had always been old. Even when she was a child, he acquired strange stains of spaghetti sauce on his khaki trousers and sprouted stray long black hairs from his cheeks. He was fussy about the temperature of beverages. And he was older still before he died, in an opiate glaze, harmless and ineffectual. Her daughter might see Rosa that way too, though she had been sober for all of Stella’s life. Before she was born, Rosa hadn’t been too much of a suck to try anything at least once, including a summer that she spent on prescr
iption painkillers, the summer after the car. She hated to admit that it had been the best summer of her life. The money from the theft added to her feeling of unabated ease and relaxation. She wore her hair out and large, ill-fitting clothes. She went to parties and slept next to men she didn’t know on ratty velvet couches. Once she woke up with a Swedish vacationer’s hand caught in her thick hair. She felt unshakeable, rich with someone else’s money, rich with someone else’s life.
Her husband. Which one? The one that mattered. She’d been playing house with the first one; she was too easy on him. Though she hadn’t put her foot down with the second one either. Blame it on her bad habit of losing her position in relationships. Of only knowing how to express herself through sex or tantrums, usually the latter. How many times had she raged at her second husband, the husband! He was a businessman, meaning he made a living out of being busy. Rosa called him ‘the boy who cried work’. How many times had he pretended to be working then come home late, smelling of the company of other businessmen. How many times had she taken to him with soft fists while he held her away from him, laughing, surprised by both the extent of her rage and her ineffectiveness. Eventually, Stella got old enough to tell her mother off for these fits. How Rosa had feared her adolescent disdain! It was the cruellest of all fates, that after all the years she’d spent kowtowing to men, her daughter would turn on her and make her do the same. This became their pattern—Rosa on the living room floor, face buried in greying shag carpet, exhausted by feeling, grovelling at her daughter’s feet. Oh! She never got what she wanted. She never got what she had coming to her.
Now Rosa was grovelling again. This time for some company.