by Deborah Reed
She sipped, tasted vodka with lemon. “Oh. Hey. Cheers,” she said, pleased with the tart burn in her throat. The next thing she knew she was taking aim at the bull’s-eye on the tree, Fluke at her feet, Averlee and Quincy leaning in on either side of her. She didn’t want to like these girls, her own nieces, a truth that flowed easier with the vodka. They had never been quite real. If she’d thought of them, really thought of them, they were nothing more than Kate and Neal’s offspring, children of a waitress and firefighter, a family made of box-set characters from a story Elin preferred never to hear. But having them on either side of her while such thoughts scurried through her brain made her feel like an ass. Little girls. Nieces. Smelled like honey and sand in the breeze.
Holding a gun made Elin feel foolish, but mostly badly behaved. No sooner had she arrived to look after these kids than a gun was being fired by her own hand. A toy, but it didn’t look like one, feel like one, even act like one. Beyond that she knew her mother wouldn’t approve, unsure if Kate would either, not to mention Rudi, and it was with everyone in mind that she curled her finger round the trigger and squeezed.
The girls ran to the tree, Fluke at their heels. Averlee shook her head and pointed at the target’s outer ring. “Not even close,” she said, deadpan.
“Come on back,” Elin said.
She tried again, repeatedly, and still couldn’t hit any part of the red circle.
“What am I doing wrong?” she asked, but did not want to hear the answer when Wink started to rise.
“No, no,” she said. “I got it. Just need some practice, that’s all.”
By the time she downed her third glass of Grey Goose lemonade, Wink sat broad-legged on his steps, warming up a baby-blue and white pearlized accordion on his lap. He wrested the pleated bellows in and out until the air filled with the sound of wheezing organs. Everything felt oddly harmless, delightfully strange, the pistol now lighter in her hand, less intimidating, the girls holding hands and dancing an impromptu polka at her back.
She fired one BB after another, cocking and squeezing, her pocket heavy with pellets, the pistol cracking off like fireworks until the bull’s-eye was finally riddled with holes.
TWELVE
HER MOTHER WOULDN’T BE HOME until close to nine p.m., so Elin had the girls take their baths before she tucked each into the narrow bed, along with assurances that she’d wait until their grandmother returned before leaving. She was still mildly drunk when she wedged her hip onto the bed near their feet to say good night, to say something she thought they ought to hear. But the strain of so much uncertainty bore down on all of them, even Fluke, watching, panting in the center of the floor as if his fur still held the day’s heat. Elin was beginning to understand how different Kate’s life had been from the one she’d presumed, or rather the one she’d made a point not to think too much about. The kids who’d never been flesh and blood with needs and laughter were not only real-life children, but their faces, especially Averlee’s, mirrored Elin’s own, and this, more than anything, filled her with an achy sadness. It filled her with worry. How had Kate been living with this? How did she behave toward Averlee? How had Neal lived with this? Was seeing Elin every day in the face of his young child too much to bear? Maybe this was why he left. Elin suddenly felt at fault for everything—Kate in the hospital, Neal long gone.
Don’t flatter yourself, Elin thought. The world does not revolve around you. Rudi would be the first to say so.
She couldn’t take her eyes off her nieces’ warm, freshly scrubbed cheeks above the blanket, their lashes long and dark with bath water. They were blameless children, sisters that her own sister was ready to leave behind.
“Good night,” Elin finally said.
“Are you coming again tomorrow?” Averlee asked.
“I suppose so.”
“What time?”
“We’ll have to see,” Elin said.
“You sound like Grandma,” Quincy said.
“Do I?”
Neither girl answered, and Elin stood, stepping toward the wall switch.
“My mom said you like secrets,” Averlee said.
Elin stopped, a kick in her heart. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“What kind of secrets?”
“How should I know? They’re secrets.”
“Why would she tell you that?”
Averlee shrugged.
“What else did she say?”
“Nothing.”
“Is that right.” Elin braced the doorframe. “Hmn,” she said, making every attempt at playing cool. “That’s funny. A joke, I guess. What was she talking about when she said this?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Try.”
Averlee clamped her jaw shut and squeezed the edge of the blanket at her throat.
“You’re not in trouble,” Elin said. “I’m just curious what she meant.”
“How long are we going to be here?” Quincy asked.
“We’ll know more tomorrow. Not long, I don’t think.”
“Will we have to move?” Averlee asked.
“Have you moved a lot?”
“I guess not.”
“I don’t see why you would,” Elin said. “Listen, about the secrets… if there’s something you promised not to tell, it’s okay to tell me.”
“Why?”
“Because. Maybe your mom was right. Maybe I do like secrets, which means I’m good at keeping them. You have any you’d like to share?”
Averlee shook her head.
“What about you, Quincy?” Elin asked.
She shook her head, too.
Elin stared as if a deeper concentration might reveal if they were telling the truth.
“Promise we’ll see you again?” Averlee asked.
“Of course you’ll see me again. But right now it’s late, and so sweet dreams, and all that,” she said, and hit the switch. An automatic nightlight glimmered near the floor.
“Good night,” their voices harmonized in the murky orange glow.
Back in the living room, Elin sat on the sofa with Fluke, gently tugging his ears down his head, his eyes bobbing into sleep. She glanced at her phone. No new messages.
Why would Kate have said such a thing about her? Why did she insist on reminding Elin of the past? It had been years, decades, since Elin had given thought to that night when she was younger than her nieces were now, asleep in the very same room. Voices rumbling down the hall, her parents, she’d thought, but then a stranger’s voice rose above the others. She’d crawled out of bed and peeked around the corner to see her mother crying into her hands on the sofa. Three policemen had pulled kitchen chairs up around her. “Looks like we have a visitor,” one said, and her mother jumped. “Oh, Elin. Sweetheart. You need to go back to bed.”
“Why are they here?” Elin asked, her calves chilled from the open front door, standing as she was in a thin nightgown, and thinking of the cold hose her mother had used on their speckled hound’s face and ears that morning, blood running off into the sandy patches of grass beneath the bathroom window where, inside, Elin had heard a noise. She’d stood on the edge of the tub, balanced above the bathwater, peering out.
“We can talk about all of this tomorrow,” her mother said. “Let me tuck you back in.”
“Where’s Dad? I want him to tuck me in.”
Elin now bolted into standing at the sound of her mother’s key in the door. Fluke barked, leaped off the sofa.
“Stay,” Elin said, as sternly as she’d ever spoken the word. Fluke froze.
“Will you look at this?” Her mother suddenly there, dropping her purse onto the table, holding her arms out to Elin. “And her little dog Toto, too.”
“Mom.”
Then holding her, squeezing in a way she’d rarely done, and Elin hugging her back.
“Are they asleep?” her mother asked, and then held Elin at arm’s length, looking her over with puckered eyes, aged ten more years. Elin touched t
he corner of her own eye, the thin lines her mother hadn’t yet seen.
“Who?” Elin asked.
“Who? The lizards in the bush. What do you mean, who? Averlee and Quincy.”
“Sorry. I’m tired. Yes. As far as I know, they’re asleep.”
“What’s his name?” Her mother looked down. Fluke worried his sights between Elin and her mother.
“Fluke.”
Her mother laughed. “What kind of name is that?”
Before Elin could answer, her mother brought a hand to Elin’s shoulder, a single pat, like a slap. “Fluke,” she said, and then walked to the kitchen and poured a glass of milk, her choice of evening drink as far back as Elin could remember. “Would you like some?”
“No. Thank you.”
“You look good,” she said, her back still turned. “Healthy. Happy. Life out there must be agreeing with you.”
Clearly Rudi hadn’t called looking for her. Elin would have heard a trace of it in her mother’s voice. “Thanks,” Elin said. “I guess so.”
Her mother faced her, glass in hand. “So, what’d you and the girls do all day?”
“Oh, we just. You know. Not much. Played around. Wink seems nice. The girls are… interesting.”
“Spooky how much Averlee looks like you,” her mother said.
“I’m sure it pleases Kate to no end.”
Her mother swallowed her milk, a touch of mania about her, as if her eight-hour shift was still buzzing beneath her skin.
“Why would Kate do this?” Elin asked. “She cut off all contact with us. If she was living alone with the girls then who did she think would take them? I assume the only reason we even found out what happened is because the police located her next of kin.”
“She called you, though,” her mother said. “The night before.”
“I know. But it’s not like she made a lot of sense. Going on about the time she nearly drowned. I guess it was some kind of warning. I don’t know. She sounded drunk.”
“What do you think we ought to do?” her mother said.
“About what?”
“These girls. And God knows what else. She won’t even let us in there to talk to her, to see what the hell is going on. I’ll tell you this much, she looked bad. She looked awful. The nurse knew her, too, said Kate had been in before.”
“For the same thing?”
“She wouldn’t tell me.”
Elin tossed her hands above her head. “This is ridiculous.”
“I don’t imagine the law’s going to hand those girls back over to Kate. That officer left a message on my cell earlier, but I didn’t get it until after my shift. Maybe that’s what it was about. He just said to call him. I tried on my way home, but he was already gone and no one at the station would tell me what it was he wanted.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure it’s against the law to try and kill yourself,” Elin said.
Her mother turned and rinsed her glass at the sink.
Elin gathered her purse and sandals and moved toward the door. She pointed Fluke in the same direction and he sat beneath the doorknob, watching her, watching her mother, his eyebrows flickering in distress. “The girls need some new clothes,” Elin said. “I’ll come back first thing in the morning and take them shopping.” She imagined them wide-awake, listening to everything she said. She rummaged through her purse for her keys. Fluke scooted out of the way as she opened the door.
“Did you say anything to them about Kate?” her mother said.
“What on earth would I say?”
“Did they ask about her?”
“No.”
Her mother gripped the edge of the counter behind her hips. “It’s been a long time,” she said. “It isn’t easy, dealing with…” She gestured to the living room as if all their troubles had gathered there. “I’m not even sure what to call what’s happened.”
“Have you really not seen Neal since before Kate disappeared?” Elin asked, the vodka thicker in her head than she’d realized, but even so, with the question now posed, it was clear as any thought she’d ever had that she’d been wanting to ask it for days.
Her mother crossed her arms. “Last I heard he was living in Arizona.”
“Arizona? What’s he doing out there?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Who told you that?”
“His cousin Angelina when I saw her at Roth’s years ago. She didn’t know exactly where. Arizona was all.”
“Do you think we should try to find him? I mean, he is their father whether we like it or not.”
“I did try to find him. I started looking right after Kate disappeared. I thought she might have taken off to wherever he was.”
“Did she?”
“I don’t know. I never found either one. I tried searching the computer, still do, but nothing ever shows up. I can’t even find Angelina on there.”
“Arizona,” Elin said.
“I’d die a happy woman if I never laid eyes on him again. I can’t imagine otherwise for you.”
Elin squeezed the keys in her fist. This was the mother she liked. The one who hated Neal. The one who’d thrown an orange tear-shaped lamp across the room at his head. “He actually came to say good-bye,” her mother told her years ago. “Can you believe that? Good-bye? I told him he had no business getting together with Kate in the first place, and you know what he said? He said, ‘What about your granddaughters?’ So I threw a lamp at him.”
“Oh my God, Mom, you didn’t.”
“I did. And the son of a bitch ducked and came up laughing.”
Elin glanced into the living room at the orange lamp on the end table, the white, modern-styled one on the other.
“I guess I better hit the road,” Elin said. “The place I’m staying is a ways out of town.”
“I didn’t mean to get so mad at you on the phone this morning. I appreciate you coming all this way.”
Elin couldn’t recall her mother ever apologizing for anything, and she took a step back, curled her fingers around the doorknob. “It’s okay. I needed a break,” she said, the humidity still hanging on, working its way through the screened porch, globbing onto her skin, while her mind continued with a mind of its own, peeling back unpleasant pieces of memory. “Working a lot, and all that. I’ll see you in the morning,” she said, and was careful, as she’d been taught, not to let the screen slam shut behind her.
THIRTEEN
WHENEVER ELIN HAD TROUBLE SLEEPING she thought of snow. Not only here, in the rose-colored bedroom with its lacy-framed portraits, but at home, in the Ehebett with the steady white noise of Rudi’s breath in her ear. It wasn’t just any snow she thought of, it was her first, like a love, like an initiation she’d stumbled through, dazedly ecstatic. Mount Hood, not long after she arrived in Oregon, her ears popping as the VW climbed the switchback, and then the first white patch tucked between a hollow in the distant hills. “There it is,” she said, and shut the radio off as if to honor, to witness the way she’d been delivered by magic into the tallest pines and peaks in the universe, to a place where it snowed. No more than a minute later, thick, cottony flakes hovered toward the windshield. “So gently,” she said, surprised at the delicate dance, but that was right before the onslaught of crystals blinded out all and sundry and made her squeal. She was alone, not just in the car, but in the world, frightened and euphoric with possibility, and this made her laugh, surrounded by a white so bright it felt holy. A clarified beauty, virtuous, she thought, and drove on in this way for the better part of thirty minutes until the sun broke through at the top of the mountain and varnished the snow with a blinding glare, forcing Elin to park in the first space near the stone lodge. She closed her eyes and wept against the steering wheel. “What is this?” she said. But she knew. Too much happiness was what it was. “Too much,” she said, after a lifetime of arrears.
On her way down the mountain she’d stopped at the first payphone and called Neal. Snow flew sideways past the glass an
d she remembered Neal telling her about the first time he saw the air fill with white ash after a warehouse fire, the way it had floated, eerily, with the slow beauty of snow, and how guilty he’d felt for being taken by it, how alluring it was in the wake of devastation.
It only took a second to understand the call would not go the way she’d imagined. Nothing would. And that was one thing, that was run-of-the-mill heartbreak, love won and lost between them, but the rest drew on a vision that was never meant to be seen.
“I’m seeing someone,” he said.
A minute later she was back in her car, a cold key in a cold ignition. She leaned over the gearshift and hollered as if down a well. “Fuck all y’all!” she yelled, and the snow gathered like virgin wool all around her. Like virgin wool, she wanted to say, wanted to scream into the phone that would have already turned her fog of warm breath into a white layer of frost on the mouthpiece. But what did she expect? She had left him, disappeared in the face of explaining all that she could not say.
Now snow was miles and months from even a possibility, and the B and B’s smell of warm, polished cedar panes filled Elin with a chilly, cramping sorrow. She tossed off the comforter and jimmied the window up as if in defiance of her own needs, searching instead for the opposite of what she wanted: a warm breeze. But the atmosphere at sea level in the tropics—three o’clock in the morning be damned—hung thickly, the scent of grass and magnolias stuck outside. Only the pulse of cicadas pierced the screen—click-buzzzzzz, click-buzzzzz—a chorus of broken sprinklers. Males, she knew, from her book on insects, puffed and yearning for mates, and against her will she thought of Rudi’s smile in the moonlight last week—his lips, and then the way she’d reached over without thinking while he talked and talked, and slid that small flip of hair across his forehead.
She gasped and jerked her hand from the window, singed by the realization that the little sprig of cowlick in Rudi’s hairline that she’d always been so fond of was identical to her father’s, right down to the tiny widow’s peak made up of several stray hairs.
She shoved the sticky window down, flung herself onto the bed, and covered her face with the sheet. She would force herself to sleep, to forget, to dream of snow. But the ceiling fan whined like a donkey braying off in a field, and Fluke’s body was hot at her feet.