by Deborah Reed
She sat up. A total of twenty-five messages on her phone. She switched on the speaker mode and held it out as if watching a video. “Where are you?” Rudi said, his voice cutting the dark. Fluke opened his eyes.
Elin showed him the glowing phone as if he’d understand and in fact he seemed to, drifting back to sleep, even as she played the beginning of each message, unable to bear the digressions toward each end.
“Elin. Just answer your phone.”
“Elin. Please.”
“Please.”
“Elin. Look.”
“Elin. It’s not as if you aren’t aware…”
“This is crazy.”
“Two days, Elin.”
“I’m begging you.”
“Elin, listen to me, I’m considering calling the police.”
“Ach, du Scheisse!”
“Four days is a long time to disappear.”
“All right, Elin, at least grant me this one thing.”
The next message began with dead air, then sniveling. Throat clearing, nose wiping, utterances that made no sense. And then, “I’m sorry,” he said, as clear as if he’d crawled across the sheets and whispered through her hair.
Morning arrived with Elin transfixed on the edge of her bed, head aching, not a migraine, but eyes inflamed from staring too long in the dark. She wrapped her arms around herself, thinking of that flip of her father’s hair, Rudi’s hair—what she wouldn’t give for a pair of scissors and one more night in the Ehebett. But she would force herself to forget. Getting rid of her past had been her strong suit, a mindful hobby for which she had a knack, going all the way back to those early years, kids asking Elin and Kate what it was like growing up without a dad. “What’s it like to walk on two feet?” Elin would say. It’s no kind of question to ask without something to compare it to, some stark before-and-after frame of reference. What had always been so thin, it seemed, were her memories of ever having had a father in the first place. Elin was six when he died, Kate five, and Elin’s surest memory was so small she wasn’t convinced it actually belonged to her or if she’d borrowed it from a story or a dream. Barely tall enough to see outside, and even then it felt as if she were on her tiptoes, peering out a window in the upper part of the wooden back door. In the yard her father swung Kate by her wrists, her dark hair flailing, their laughter loud enough to penetrate the glass. But then her father faltered and nearly toppled into the grass. Kate stumbled, still laughing, while her father clutched his knees and hunched, bracing, as if catching his breath. Her mother appeared from the side of the house, her stride long and hard, direct in the way she came at Elin and Kate when they’d done something wrong. A camera swung around her neck and she grabbed it steady. Kate seemed oblivious to whatever was happening, dropping herself into a line of cartwheels in the opposite direction while her father stood upright, brushed his cowlick to the side, and grasped her mother’s arm. His stance was tall and serious as he spoke directly into her face as if making sure the words were not only heard but seen—he was just that close. Her mother shot back, pointing a finger in his face, her mouth a tight slit of quiet, spitting words Elin couldn’t hear. Kate’s hands froze in the air, then dropped to her sides as she approached, lacing her fingers through her mother’s, and then her father’s, while behind the closed door Elin’s insides warmed, the tips of her fingers sweating on the wooden trim. Her breath made an icy fog on the window, and when she wiped it away, the yard, even the space between the trees, wobbled with a mystifying heartache Elin would forever link to autumn sun.
FOURTEEN
“WELL, THAT’S JUST AWFUL,” SHUG said, sliding the silver pitcher of syrup toward Elin, who quickly poured more than she needed, her waffle floating in a maple pool on the blue and white Wedgewood china. She wasn’t sure why she’d told Shug about Kate being in the hospital. Divulging something so personal to a stranger was tacky at best, but that wasn’t the problem. The person foremost on Elin’s mind right now was Rudi. She was starting to remember him with tenderness, with a tinge of guilt she didn’t understand. She didn’t want to understand. She was angry. She thought she was. And in the right, no doubt about it, which was where she planned to remain. All this venting about her irresponsible, yet obviously ill, sister felt like a lie, even as Elin let go the truest details.
“It is awful,” Elin said, speaking of one thing, meaning another, her mind incapable of suppressing Rudi’s apology, the final confirmation that what Lotus had told her was true, his apology as good as a photograph of his dick in Poppy’s mouth.
She took a bite, set her fork aside, and drew a long breath through her nose, chewing quickly as heat rose beneath her skin. She swallowed in stages, and after a long gulp of well water she said, “But that’s my sister,” as if she had nothing but disdain for a woman who, in the midst of some awful misery, had tried to kill herself. The room went silent, only Fluke chomping a bone at her feet. Elin was heartless, a part of her was, and she sat with that, aware of her capacity to shift half her attention toward the sun warming the wooden shelves, the rows of antique books—Twain, Faulkner, O’Connor, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky—their dusty paper scent in the air.
“Well,” Shug said. “If there are things you need to work out with your family…”
“Oh, I don’t—”
“It’s been slow around here. You’re welcome to stay as long as you like. I’m happy to discount your room.”
It’s not as if you aren’t aware, Rudi had started to say. He might have ended with any number of things. Awareness bloomed like algae in Elin’s chest. I’ve done nothing, she thought. My mom says you like secrets.
“That’s kind of you,” Elin said, unsure if she’d followed the thread of their conversation correctly. “I need to figure out a way. To help her.” Maybe she should leave. Not just the B and B, but Florida altogether. She could have taken a vacation anywhere in the world. She could have thrown Rudi out of the house. Why had she come here? For Kate? Elin nearly laughed. Her mother had been right to ask.
“I appreciate your offer.” Elin stood, took a step toward the foyer. “And allowing Fluke to hang around with you while I’m gone this morning. I should have kenneled him. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“It doesn’t sound to me like there was much time for thinking.”
“I suppose.”
“He’s a comfort, I imagine. Probably best that he came with you. I don’t mind for a minute. I appreciate the company.”
“I have a feeling things will turn around within a couple of days. I’m afraid I need to get going. My nieces—”
“Oh, those poor girls. Go, go, go,” Shug said, coming to her feet, shooing with one hand, clearing plates with the other, and for a second Elin caught a glimpse of what it might feel like to live alone in this handsome house, preferring the company of a dog, of strangers whose problems departed with them, leaving behind idle rooms and afternoons to pull a book from a shelf, take to a corner chair where nothing else would be expected for the day. The idea of such solitude exhilarated the tiny hairs on Elin’s arms.
“Thank you,” she said.
Shug barely had a chance to reply before Elin escaped out the front door through the shady blanket of willow limbs drooping in the sun.
FIFTEEN
MONTHS BEFORE JACKSON DIED HE had sat in an aluminum-framed lawn chair holding hands with Vivvie standing at his side. They faced a pile of chopped pinewood at the edge of the backyard, above them the most transparent night sky Vivvie had ever seen, glittering with stars. Lightning bugs, like buoyant embers, sparked the distant dark. Jackson let go of Vivvie’s hand and attempted to strike a match in his lap but snapped several sticks in half before handing the matchbox to her. She lit one on the first try. The girls had been asleep in the house for hours. They would wake in the morning to a circle of ash in a yard that was their playground, wake to some kind of summer campfire that mysteriously had not included them. It would be the first of too many things never to be explained,
and the thought seared Vivvie’s already fragile heart. She held the burning match, stalled by the question: What do you love more, Vivien Fenton, your love for Jackson, or Jackson? She tossed the match onto the woodpile. A whoosh of yellow, tinged in ruby red, ignited the air.
The chorus of crickets gave way to the crackle of bark, cut grass to lighter fluid, and finally scorched tar.
“I can’t argue,” Jackson said. He didn’t touch her, glanced only at the box of photographs near Vivvie’s feet. “I’ve got no right to begrudge you as to what goes on after.”
He was referring to a conversation they’d begun earlier that day. Vivvie had woken with a purpose, her head on the pillow, face toward the wall, and had said, “Sometimes it’s better to let the very best of us go up in flames.” She’d avoided his eyes throughout the day, and then, after the girls were in bed, she dragged the box of photographs across the length of the yard to the pit of logs in the sandy soil. “I don’t want to remember,” she said. “I already can’t stand having them in the house.”
“All right,” he said. “All right.” His fingers loosened, and the first photograph, a black and white taken on the Carrabelle River before they were married, began to fall. How young they appeared, Vivvie’s long hair tied with a kerchief that Jackson had freed with a hook of his finger, and beneath them the wool blanket on the shore, orange and green and sun-scented with animal fleece, with sex, and their cheeks sheer with affection fanning out past the edges of the photograph—all of it fluttering into the fire, coiling against the heat.
“Burnt offerings,” Jackson said, meant as a joke, meant to appease her, tracing around a guilt she knew he carried for a world over which he had no control. Maybe he went along with it because he thought it would push her toward a new life more quickly, make it easy for her to find someone new. “You’re still young, Viv,” he’d told her months before. “So beautiful and strong, and so damn fun to be around.” Maybe saying that made him feel valiant, selfless. He was wrong about everything.
Vivvie took his hand, feeling tiny sleeping faces at her back, envisioning what their eyes would never see, all that their minds and hearts would never know. She let go and clutched a hefty, clumsy stack of photos, chucked it onto the pyre. They scattered between logs and caught quickly, emitting sparks and blue flames, a plastic chemical smell that made her sick.
SIXTEEN
THE MORNING HUMIDITY CAUSED A spongy feel on the back of Vivvie’s neck, wisps of hair slipping free of the hairclip loosened by sweat. She hadn’t slept well. Summer had never felt this hot. She was born and raised here, and no one could tell her different.
But the girls had wanted to wait outside for Elin so Vivvie busied herself nearby, deadheading petunias and brushing aside grass clippings from the sidewalk after Wink’s early morning mow. Wink sat on his steps, whittling a stick with a silver pocketknife that caught the sun. After a quick hello, Vivvie avoided his attention. She’d been taken over by an unexpected shyness she didn’t understand.
Twenty minutes later, she happened to look up. Wink waved his pocketknife, more at the girls than her, it seemed, and Averlee and Quincy smiled and lifted opposite hands, like a two-headed girl in a dance. Vivvie marveled at their ability to sit so close for so long in this heat without bickering.
Wink waved again, this time at Vivvie. In all the years they’d been neighbors, Vivvie had never seen him whittle, and here paper-thin strips of blond wood gathered at his bare feet, his lips pursed in concentration. Not long ago he’d come through her line at Roth’s, handed her a twenty, and said, “I’ve known you, what… a decade? And other than the fact that you seem awfully fond of that jasmine at the side of your house the way you linger on watering it every morning, you’re kind of a mystery, Vivvie Fenton.”
She’d felt herself go red and immediately looked to see who might have heard. But heads were turned, women comparing prices, tapping melons, the world carrying on even as it shifted to one side. Wink grinned, waiting for her smart-aleck reply. This was how they knew one another—a baiting banter volleying back and forth—and a sentence from all those spy films did in fact form in Vivvie’s mind: I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you. Vivvie’s mouth clamped shut and her eyes saw nothing but the tattered bill in her hand, her thoughts knotted, incapable of whistling past the image of him watching her through his window.
She gestured a hand to Wink across the yard, smiling weakly beneath the dawning realization that her granddaughters were the cause of the shyness. Mercy me. Small voices and peanut butter breath. Fingerprints on the plate glass window. These little sisters had laid Vivvie bare. A ragged skin peeled back, a blaze of light shining on the person she used to be.
SEVENTEEN
ELIN’S NIECES WERE WAITING ON the steps when she pulled into the driveway, knees tucked together like a set of dolls positioned so as not to fall forward. The humidity had kinked their hair even farther above their heads, and when Elin made eye contact through the windshield they gazed like feral cats she had the urge to cradle, but mostly feared.
She got out and stepped back as if from the strange thoughts she was having. “See? I came just like I promised,” she said, hearing an unintended sarcasm in her voice. It was already hot and getting hotter. “Shit,” she murmured, fanning her shirt.
“Where you girls headed this morning?” Wink called out, shaving a small piece of wood with what appeared to be a pocketknife.
“Shopping for new clothes,” she said.
“That ought to give me enough time,” he said, and went back to the stick in his hands.
Before Elin had a chance to ask what he meant, her mother opened her screen door but hung back, her hand on the trim, looking older than Elin had noticed the night before, the dark patches now visible in the sunlight. She squeezed a red dishtowel in a fist at her side.
This house, her mother, the whole damn state was like a box of Cracker Jacks, strange memories the cheap prize at the bottom. Here was Kate ripping an Etch A Sketch from Elin’s fingers at the kitchen table. Instead of yanking it back, Elin had screamed loudly, fiercely, as if Kate had taken an ax to her, her breath nearly spent when their mother lunged and swung at them with a dish towel, stinging their cheeks and ears, swatting and batting as if they were a swarm of bees. And then her mother snatched the Etch A Sketch from the table and slammed it to the floor. Shards of red and silver plastic ricocheted and stung Elin’s ankles beneath the table. Elin kept her head bowed, unable to suppress a grin. She cupped her face as if crying, but it was laughter she hid in her hands, uncontrollable laughter. Let Kate try and use it now, she thought.
Home.
Her mother had been eyeing Elin’s car since sticking her head out the door—hood, grille, headlights, tires. With the sun-bleached truck in front, and the tin-roofed, century-old cracker house to the side, Elin’s Audi was as showy as a float in a parade, a metallic grey rocket ship sent from the future. “If you’re going to have the girls out in the sun you might want to pick up some sunscreen,” her mother said. “I’m all out.”
Had she even greeted her? “Good morning, Mom,” Elin said.
“Good morning.” Her mother surprised her with a half smile.
“Come on,” Averlee said, taking Quincy by the hand as she stood. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Elin grinned to herself.
“Reminds me of someone,” her mother said.
Elin’s stomach roiled as she opened the rear door. “Scoot on in there and put your belts on,” she said.
“I know how to do it,” Averlee said, guiding Quincy in first.
Her mother tsked at Elin’s back. “The boss,” she said.
Elin fanned her shirt again. “I assume you mean me,” she said over her shoulder.
“If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck…”
“Any news about my sister?”
Averlee’s head shot up from the backseat. If thoughts could fly, hers would have launched like birds through the window.
Her mother peered in Wink’s direction, wiped her hairline on her arm, and didn’t meet Elin’s eyes when she said, “I’m getting ready to call over there.” She surveyed the car again. “I just tried that officer who left the message last night. He wasn’t in yet.”
Elin nodded at the ground, the trees, and now she too couldn’t take her eyes from the car, as if it were the thing at the center of this tale—a vessel, a magic carpet, a gift from Rudi’s fairytale life, delivering Elin into this most unlikely land.
EIGHTEEN
THE TREE-LINED STREET, SIDEWALK CAFÉS, and coffee shops of Winter Park reminded Elin of Portland with a grander, European flair. But such consolation was no match for the overriding fact that she was still in Florida, no more than five miles from where she grew up, as if the last decade of her life had been nothing more than a dream of a grown-up life out west, only to wake and find herself in Florida, two kids in the backseat, and married to Neal.
She glanced behind her. The girls had leaned into their windows, gaping at the colorful shops.
“This is where we’re buying clothes?” Averlee asked.
Elin searched for a parking space. “Why am I not surprised that your mother has never brought you here?” she said as much to herself as to them, and directed the air conditioning toward her face in anticipation of getting out of the car and into the heat. She sucked at the chill as if it were oxygen meant to clear her head. She joggled her temple. Was mentioning Kate something she was supposed to do? Or so obviously not what she was supposed to do? She bore her finger between the thready muscles. No headache. Not yet.
A turn signal flickered down the block as a car wedged out of a space, inches at a time. Elin flipped her blinker and waited, checked the side mirror for traffic behind her, and was startled by the reflection of a man with light, wavy hair and black sunglasses. He was singing, or at least mouthing the words, tapping a finger on the steering wheel, and bobbing his head. She glanced up at the rearview mirror for a fuller picture. “For fuck’s sake,” she whispered. The universe had one hell of a sense of humor. The man was driving a canary-colored Karmann Ghia with the canvas top rolled down. She’d thought of Neal only seconds before and here was the car he used to drive when she lived with him. Same color, same make, if she wasn’t mistaken.