by Deborah Reed
Elin rolled her window down, stuck her arm out, and motioned for him to go around. He finally hiked his shoulders, mouthed a sheepish “oh,” laughed, and made a move, lifting a hand to wave as he passed. At least it wasn’t Neal.
They had to walk five blocks before finding a children’s clothing store. The Pretty Penny, located on Winter Park’s exclusive Park Avenue.
“What’s that smell?” Quincy said as the three of them stepped inside.
“Vanilla bubblegum, I think,” Elin said.
“I don’t like it,” Quincy said, in the exact moment a saleswoman—too young to be draped in pearls—approached them by way of small, high-heeled steps across the pastel-blue carpet.
“Me neither,” Elin said.
“Can I help you find something?” The woman’s accent had a tinge of Florida sorority.
“No,” Elin said. “They’re. We’re—”
“She’s our aunt,” Averlee cut in.
Elin covered her own grin. “Just putting that out there,” she said, “just in case.” But the young woman didn’t seem to have a sense of humor. Elin glanced uncomfortably at the miniature outfits on the wall—green aprons complete with tiny tools in the pockets. Kitchen aprons with frills, a little too French in Elin’s view, a little too grown up, and next to those hung vest-pocket suits for boys. For playing dress-up? For every day? Elin blinked repeatedly, not really wanting to understand.
The saleswoman shifted her hip and slowly ground her high heel into the carpet, a nervous-looking habit, perhaps to fill the void. “Well. Okay,” she said. “I’m Tiff if you need anything,” and off she went in her tiny steps to the counter, hands on hips before dropping them, forcefully, and adjusting her hair with a sigh that sounded a lot like frustration.
“Go ahead and look around, pick out a few things,” Elin said. It occurred to her that she’d gone through all of the cash in her wallet on the way to Florida, and now her debit card was about to show a purchase, which Rudi could view online within seconds, no doubt gleaning all kinds of satisfaction from finally knowing where she was. And that where she was was here, in Florida, and on top of everything, buying kids’ clothes for her nieces, because, who else? Oh, she had reconnected with her family! Wasn’t that exactly what she’d needed? Wasn’t that exactly what he’d been trying to get her to do for years?
The girls circled the tables like sluggish fish, eyes shimmering reflections of jazzy fabrics and sunlight streaming through the windows. They appeared to have gone into shock.
“For the love of God,” Elin said, and plucked T-shirts and shorts from a nearby stack. “What size do you wear?” she asked, holding a shirt in front of Quincy, who stiffened at Elin’s proximity. Elin reared back and tried to compose herself. “Let’s get this show on the road,” she said, and scooped up a pile of possibilities, including belts and underwear, and handed everything to Averlee. “Take these into a dressing room and try them on.”
“Whatever you say, Captain.”
This was why Elin never wanted children. Mercurial little creatures capable of doing or saying anything at anytime, getting away with unreasonable acts, wild beings uninhabited by rationale. She should know, she’d been one herself. Kate, too, and even more so. You could not train a child like a dog, and while Elin was well aware of how awful that might sound if spoken out loud, she also clung wholeheartedly to its truth.
“I’ll wait here,” Elin said, and by the time she sat in the floral wing-back chair across from the dressing room stalls, the latch on the door had already clicked in place. She checked her phone. Nothing new from Rudi. Nothing from her mother, and in the absence of some kind of word about Kate, Elin’s irritation at her sister’s lame cry for help, or attention grabbing, or whatever it was she was trying to prove, had always been trying to prove, rose to a new level. Kate was the first to scream in an argument, first to stomp and curl a fist, first to leap to the worst possible conclusion. It was as if she believed the world was designed to slight her and she had no choice but to lunge and sucker punch a kidney in order to seize what she considered hers.
As for the rare times when she wasn’t being confrontational? She was lying low, scheming her next move, like the time Elin found herself vulnerable after two glasses of wine and confessed to Kate how suffocated she felt by having only ever lived within miles of where they grew up. She revealed her fantasies of walking out the door and never looking back, and she asked Kate if she too had to suppress the urge to get away, to crawl out from under a constant, invisible weight. And what had Kate so breezily replied? “Not really. But that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve a decent life, Elin. You should just go for it and see what Neal does. I wouldn’t be surprised if he follows you. Of course he’ll follow you. We should all be so lucky to have someone look at us the way he looks at you.” How had Elin not realized that the bright tone in Kate’s voice wasn’t sincerity but rather Kate’s own excitement for a future about to unfold? It shocked Elin still, how quickly she’d been willing to believe her, how moved she’d been by the simple gesture. She hung onto Kate’s words like a lucky talisman dangling from the rearview mirror on the day she drove away.
Fuck her. If Kate had really wanted to kill herself she could have used a surefire method. Slit her wrists or something.
Elin covered her eyes, on a roll it seemed, toward epic levels of uncharitable, disgusting convictions. She dropped her hand in her lap. Then again. How dare Kate put everyone through this, put her own daughters through this, and then refuse visitors? What would she do if Elin just showed up in the flesh? Have security throw her out?
Elin rubbed her eyes, drawing the ache to the surface.
If the girls were talking she couldn’t hear. Just the faint rustling and buckling of clothes, white noise making her drowsier than she’d already suddenly become.
When the latch finally slid free it was Averlee who appeared. Elin would have bet money on Quincy coming out first, Averlee showing her off like a prized goat. But here was Averlee in an outfit of eerie resemblance to Elin’s—a cobalt blue T-shirt and tan capris.
Averlee stood before the tall mirror in the open room and gazed at herself as if she were alone. She appeared smaller, sweeter, more delicate in reflection.
“I can’t get this belt,” Quincy called from inside the stall.
Elin stood behind Averlee, the wall at their backs covered in a red and black tapestry depicting folktales—wolves, tall pines, cabins with smoky chimneys, birds in flight. Above them a skylight shined a cone of yellow sun onto their heads. It was as if they stood on stage, two identical selves gazing forward with rounded eyes, their mouths hoop-shaped discs like a couple of stunned Russian dolls no longer stacked, no longer hidden one inside the other.
“Averlee?” Quincy called again.
Averlee sighed deeply at herself. “My mom will never see me in this, will she?”
What a morbid thing to say. She might look like Elin but she was definitely her mother’s daughter. Of all the replies that came to Elin’s mind (Why would you say that, it isn’t true, of course she will) followed by an imaginary round of enthusiastic laughter meant to clobber the mawkishness into submission and declare it a joke—nothing, not a single utterance, managed to fizzle past Elin’s lips. She was struck numb. And now too many beats were passing in anticipation that something should be said, the right words refusing to save her, save them both, and the next thing Elin knew she was touching Averlee’s hair, petting its length through her fingers, a downy silk, gossamer threads just like her father’s, spun so light they felt like nothing at all.
“I don’t know how to do this belt,” Quincy whined.
Elin held the velvety strands in both hands, forgetting she was really just a stranger to this child. Her old desire to barrel smack-dab through the middle of things as if what was happening had no effect, as if nothing had ever happened, was no match for this small face in the mirror, her words as true as any Elin would ever hear. Kate was going to succeed, one way or
another. She was going to leave these children behind. Elin saw her swallowing pills in the dark, heard the sound of her voice threatening a razor behind the bathroom door, felt the white hot sting of Kate’s heel striking Elin’s jaw beneath the ocean, the spongy give of Kate’s breastbone on the shore as Elin forced the life back inside her.
She released Averlee’s hair, stepped aside, and rested her fingertips against her own lips, recalling how lifeless her sister’s had felt against them, the funneling fire in her own chest, a cauterized burn from exhaling more fiercely than seemed humanly possible for an eleven-year-old girl.
My mother said you like secrets.
Elin touched Averlee’s shoulder, spun her around, and kneeled until their faces were inches apart. “Don’t be angry at her,” she said, feeling a flash behind one eye, and now another as she stared into what appeared to be her own eyes freakishly reflecting back.
She stood just long enough to reach the armrest and sit in the chair.
“I got it,” Quincy said, standing before them, her outfit slovenly mismatched, red stripes and yellow dots, a tiny clown with wild hair, smiling and happy for all the world to see.
NINETEEN
“THERE HAVE BEEN CALLS TO Children’s Services,” Officer Moore told Vivvie on the phone. “From your daughter’s neighbor, about her not looking after her kids. You understand she’s sick. Not the suicide attempt. That’s not the sick I’m referring to here.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Vivvie said, but that was a lie, wasn’t it? Hadn’t she understood the moment she saw Kate’s scraggy arms and legs, that tremor in her hand? And yet she’d pretended with the nurse and doctor, pretended with Elin and the girls, pretended with her own mind that what had flowed through Jackson’s veins could not possibly be flowing through her daughter’s. Kate, a young, galloping surge wherever she went, the way she’d thumped and jumped through the house, into the truck, across the yard and up a tree, as if to feel her own body, as if in defiance of her own future, a destiny that had her pinned to a bed. Maybe all that anger was a way of igniting herself, her spiteful poetry nothing more than a premonition, an awareness that life, from the start, had been stacked against her.
“I’m not supposed to give advice,” Officer Moore said. “But if I were you, I’d get to the courts before something happens. I apologize for being so blunt, but having to untangle the legal system along with everything else—”
“Why would the hospital tell you this and not me?” she asked, unable to stop herself from dodging, from giving voice to one injustice as if it might somehow alleviate the other.
“The past complaints included that she was sick. It’s part of my report, Mrs. Fenton. And that report is public.”
An hour later Vivvie was still stuck at the kitchen table, feeling the emptiness of the rooms around her, each grounded by neglect for so long, nothing touched or moved, even her eyes not fully taking in what was before her throughout decades-long comings and goings, her dull, meek routine as predictable and pathetic as a widow’s worn path to a grave.
Having her granddaughters here, their eyes roaming her house, Averlee’s particularly intent, as if searching for the thing she was sure was hidden there, returned Vivvie to the terror she had felt over losing her daughters after losing Jackson. How afraid she’d been of revealing her fear, her insides nothing but deltas of panic and worry. She’d withheld herself beyond reason, never quite kind, never quite supportive, affectionate only when they were sick, when fevers and colds had changed the color in their cheeks, the shape of their eyes, their mouths turned quiet and helpless. They didn’t seem like her children then, no longer resembling their father or behaving like sisters who fought day and night with few breaths between, and it was then, only then, that she would stroke their hair and kiss the warm tops of their heads, illness and febrile sleep affording her the right to say, I love you.
“It wasn’t always this way,” she said to the empty room, as if they’d gathered at the table, daughters and granddaughters under the same roof for the first time. She wanted to tell them about the winter before Jackson was diagnosed, when nothing more than a few spasms in his leg had caught his attention, nothing to stop Elin and Kate from climbing all over him every time he sat down. He and Vivvie bought a new sofa and chairs but still preferred the outdoors, especially evenings in winter, wool blankets like ponchos shielding them from the chill on the porch swing. One night Jackson hummed an old song from when they’d first met in high school, but he couldn’t recall the name of the song or the words past the refrain. Vivvie tried but was unable to retrieve any more than Jackson, so they let that one go and began to harmonize another, but they came up short again. The bigger picture was that neither could remember an entire song, not these songs or any others, from the days before they were parents, as if it wasn’t until after their girls were born that their life together had truly begun.
“Here we go,” Jackson said, and began singing “Bye, Baby Bunting.” Vivvie laughed and sang, “Daddy’s gone a hunting,” and they carried the tune with the seriousness of an anthem, all the way to the very last line, “A rosy wisp of cloud to win, to wrap his baby bunting in.”
“What does that mean?” Jackson asked. “A rosy wisp of cloud to win?” They dug for an answer—historical references, symbolism, a scholarly discussion of a nursery rhyme. It was only when their laughter exploded that they finally quit, and Jackson stopped short and said, “I do believe I love you more than I did yesterday,” and Vivvie said, “Isn’t that a song?” and he said, “Probably,” and she asked him to sing it but he didn’t know the words.
Vivvie smashed her milk glass in the sink, busting it to pieces against the stainless steel. Time was nothing. Jackson could crawl inside her mind and the years would evaporate into weeks, weeks to days, days to seconds, until he was alive again, until he was dead again.
The silence of the house without her granddaughters was like a bully forcing her back to a wall. Vivvie flipped on the radio as if other voices could force it out, but that local gal’s song was playing again, “Gull on a Steeple,” and Vivvie didn’t want to hear a sad ballad about falling into the past, returning to the one she loved. She shut it off and the silence was replaced by a hard wind, whistling, flapping the screens.
A small knock at the door sent her scrambling after the broken glass. She tore a paper towel from the roll and used it to scoop the shards into the trash, her gut filling with a sickly excitement that maybe it was Kate. Maybe this hospital business had been a misunderstanding. They were about to come to their senses, all of them, but Vivvie and Kate for starters, right here, right now, with Vivvie taking the first step, drawing on whatever courage she owned to speak about Jackson. No more pretending as if he never existed, no more behaving as if memories of him were so bad she couldn’t speak his name. “I’ve been wrong about everything,” she would say, “I ruined all that was entrusted to me,” and that would be something. That would make all the difference.
The wind jerked the door when Vivvie opened it.
“Storm’s coming,” Wink said. The sky curled in shades of grey and green at his back, the air taut with electricity.
“I see that,” she said.
“Supposed to be bad. The tropical storm is now a hurricane, just off Cuba.” He pinched a sewing needle between his forefinger and thumb.
“What’s that?”
“I got this splinter. Got a few of them stuck inside my hand. I can’t see good enough to get them out.”
“I didn’t hear about the storm,” Vivvie said.
“Category one.”
Another gust yanked the door. “Get on in here,” Vivvie said. “Before you get swept away.”
Wink had never been inside, not like this, no deeper than reaching for a glass of water in the doorway, but one wouldn’t know it by the way he fell back into the sofa when Vivvie gestured toward it. He relaxed in the corner, foot over knee.
Vivvie lit the orange lamp at his side and Wink l
eaned toward the light, picking at his hand.
“Scoot on over and let me have that needle,” Vivvie said.
Wink did as he was told and Vivvie sat to his right in the corner, drawing his hand across her lap, firmly beneath the glow so that his upper body arched across her. “What were you doing with that stick?” she asked. “You must have a dozen splinters in here.”
“Making a whistle.”
“A whistle.”
“Nothing wrong with a whistle.”
“What do you need with a whistle?”
“I didn’t say I needed one.”
Vivvie dropped her head to the side, rolled her eyes up toward his face, inches from her own.
“My hands are soft,” he said. “If they were rough those splinters wouldn’t have been able to get in there.”
“Are you bragging or apologizing?”
Wink smiled just enough for her to smell mint on his breath.
This was the first time she’d held a man’s hand since Jackson was alive, the first time she’d been this close, and her skin tingled with the heat of nervous sweat.
“I thought your granddaughters might like a whistle. I planned to make two but they may have to settle for one.”
Vivvie pressed her back into the sofa, widening the space between them. “Did you finish it?”
“There’s a little more to it than I figured.”
“I hadn’t guessed.”