I set my hand against the wood. It was beaten and sooty with weather and age. A splintered edge snagged the loose threads of my dress as I leaned my knee against it. The steel handles were peeling with rust and bolted shut from the other side.
I ran back to Fritzi. “There’s a storm cellar.”
When she did not answer I drew close to the fence, trying to see her through the slits. “Fritzi, where y’at?”
After a pause, she asked: “Is it locked?”
“Yes . . . but the wood is awful weak.”
I instructed her to keep a lookout as I ran back, the faint sound of her calls to me fading in the yard’s uncanny quiet. I began kicking against the cellar doors, weighing them down enough to crackle and bend, oddly pliant. I scoped the yard for a helpful tool. My face paint was melting, mingling with sweat, and ran sticky down my neck. I looked at the long, sweeping grass around my feet, where Connie might be waiting underneath while I faltered, again; it was this ever-tightening knot that drove my body; it swung my arms up and weighed my fists so that they fell in pounding, bruising blows. I fell back onto the grass and caught my breath. The dull drain of futility made the yard loud, the heat stiff.
A cold draft touched my cheek, and fell away. I turned and saw the ruddy tin roof of a gardening shed jutting between the trees. Its door was partway open when I reached it. I nudged it and the wood dragged against the floor with a dusty scrape. It was the same shape as Mama’s Wendy house, but bleak with disuse and devoured by dark fungus.
I buried my nose in the crook of my elbow. My mother had warned me never to go near black mould, but a steelheaded axe hung by a thick cluster freckling the wood. I stepped in, the door closing behind me, and all of the day’s light snapped off. I felt around the wall for the axe’s handle. It was all blackness in front of me. My hand found a smooth wooden grip and pulled it from its hold. Its weight surprised me and I dropped it, the blade clanging against the floor by my feet, and I fumbled around to find it, dragging it out of the shed and through the thorny shrubs across the yard.
Fritzi was still calling for me. She was kicking the fence, the iron lock jangling like an alarm bell.
“Fritzi. Fritzi, shut up and calm down.”
“You stopped answering.” Her breaths were so loud I heard them through the fence. “You don’t — you don’t think sometimes.”
“I found an axe.”
“Unlock the fence.”
“Did you hear me?”
“Unlock the fence, Bonnie, or I’ll scream my damn head off, I’m not joking around.”
I set the axe on the ground and stretched onto my toes to reach the latch. “If we get caught, you remember I said we needed a lookout.”
Fritzi pushed through the door and startled me by wrapping her arms fiercely around me. “You scared the life out of me.” She pulled away and brought my hands together, looking at the torn flesh along the outer edges. “What did you do to yourself?”
“Tried to open the storm cellar.” I pointed toward the orange grove. “It’s over there under the big tree.”
I led her to the cellar doors, but they proved harder to cut through than anticipated. The wood was thin, but the axe’s blade was dull, and it took some time for us to split a hole wide enough through which to crawl. I felt along the splintered ends of hacked pine and peered in.
“Stay put a minute,” Fritzi said. She lowered herself into the hole backwards, gripping my arms as the wood’s ragged edges dug into her sides. The bones of her torso were defined even through her blouse, and I held my breath terrified that the many sharp, protruding angles would slide right through the soft hollows between her ribs.
I could not see a thing beyond her — not a light bulb, a floor, the stairs under her feet. She wavered as she found her bearings, and lowered herself onto her knees as I came in after her, guiding my feet to the first low step.
It was a difficult descent in the dark. The steps were spaced too far apart and my foot continuously hung in panic, searching for the landing with an uneasy wave of suspension until Fritzi’s hand reached out to mine and she whispered: “Follow my voice. We’re at the bottom.” We stood in the dark. I felt Fritzi moving away and reached out for her.
“Where are you?”
“I think I found a lamp,” she said. There was a clink and a bulb sprang on, flushing the cellar with light. She was on the other side of the room, pinching the chain of a fluorescent kitchen lamp. I hurried over to her. “Looks like a fallout shelter. Remember Daddy wanted to build one? He said we could set a tunnel up from the basement.” The shock had not left Fritzi’s face. I knew it looked the same on me. “Not sure what kind of fallout shelter this is supposed to be.”
It was unlike the pictures I had seen in the war films and brochures presented at school. A stout canopy bed reached all the way to the low, curved ceiling, with misty pink drapes like a wedding gown train. Beside it was a bureau bordered in gold trim, and a vanity with silver combs and cut-glass bowls filled with pins and coils of velvet ribbon. The vanity’s mirror did not match its table; it was newer, a modern piece one would order from a department store catalogue.
Below our feet the dank bunker floor had been covered in tufted scatter rugs, but I could feel the hard cement through my sandals.
“What do you reckon it’s for?” I asked. Though built in the fashion of civil defense, it had the doted upon quality of a nursery. Neither did the silence fit; the air had pulsated with a fresh reverberation of sound before we had begun to speak, a hum I felt along the inside of my ears and that grew stronger in the direction of the canopy bed. I reached into the warm yarn of my pocket for Connie’s necklace, remembered that it was no longer there, and drew open the curtain.
I fell back against Fritzi, whose arms locked around me. A girl sat on the far corner of the bed, blinking out at us from between strands of oxblood hair.
PART FOUR
Below the Orange Grove
Chapter 20
IT WAS THE girl from the swamp, that much I could tell. The redhead collecting gator traps by the great black willow. I stared into her pinprick pupil, holed in the waxy blue of her right eye.
She had calmed down enough after a minute or two of Fritzi’s tempering assurances, but ours remained a nebulous presence, and she kept to the other side of her bed.
“You’re not allowed to be here,” she said.
I stared at her with a rock in my throat. It must have been the face paint, because she did not seem to recognize me.
“You’re Candice?” Fritzi asked. “Pleasure to meet you, Candice.”
It occurred to me then that Fritzi was afraid, perhaps as afraid as I was. She was speaking in the polite, measured tone she never used with anyone other than the strangers who smoked in the supermarket parking lot and offered to help us carry our groceries. She was holding my hand, too, and she did not do that, either, unless she hardly realized it.
The cellar’s light cast no more than an obfuscating yellow glow, but I saw the slow softening of Candice’s features at the mention of her name.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’m Candy Pyke. You must know my uncle, then. Is that why you’re here?” She had a crisp midwestern accent, scattered by her quick breaths. “My uncle didn’t say I’d be having visitors.”
“Your Uncle Dorian,” I said.
Candy crawled to the edge of the bed and walked to her vanity. She began to fuss eagerly with her hair, her fingers moving in formal yet jumpy modulations as she slid pins about her head. Each one bore a small plastic, yellow rosebud. “He’s usually a dear, so I really can’t fathom why he’d be so inhospitable. I suppose you were forced to let yourselves in?”
There was a hot roiling rush through my body as I watched her reflection in the vanity mirror. But for her eyes’ disparate shades, they were the same as Dorian’s, both in shape and their pale gold-dust lashes. I saw his grey eyes now as clearly as I did the evening he stared up at us from the hallway, with that splintered look across hi
s face.
A wet burn rose in my throat. I swallowed it down and squeezed the back of the chair beside me. My reflection glared at me, next to Candy’s, in the vanity mirror. A clammy-white veil of sweat hung over my face.
Fritzi had drawn closer to her without releasing my hand. “He meant to surprise you. We arrived a little early, that’s all.”
Candy pinched a large yellow button earring into each earlobe. They were identical to a pair my mother had bought during the war, far too mature for this girl, and they sat almost morbidly in their cheeriness next to Candy’s faded skin. “I really have been awfully lonely lately, with all that’s been happening. Uncle Dorian hasn’t had much time for me, you understand. All of the terrible commotion between him and Leopold. It’s so troubling to watch, and of course you simply mustn’t take sides.” She gave a rather spirited sigh. “Well, you know how it is with family.” She was wearing a dark green dress with floral imprints and sticky little holes along the high, netted collar. Her hair hung in crisp curls held back in a velvet bow. She wore no shoes or socks.
It was a struggle to hear myself over the pulse in my ears. “What are you doing down here?”
“I live here.” She looked surprised at my having to ask such a question. “Now do tell me. I’ve never seen the Mardi Gras floats — what were they like this year?” When I did not answer, she drew a circle in the air around her face. “You’re painted for the parade, are you not?”
Fritzi’s frame looked strained enough to snap. “Come with us,” she said. “We’ll all go together. It’s a magnificent parade, you can’t go on living in New Orleans without ever seeing it.”
“Oh, no. That’s out of the question,” Candy said. “Visitors serve a social purpose, but there are limits. There have to be.” She slouched stylishly with her fingers parted over the vanity surface. “My uncle insists upon a handful of visitors every year. I’m home-schooled, you see. He says it’s the only way I’ll make any friends.”
My blood felt as though it had stopped moving, resting stunned and cold under my skin. “Do your friends come here often?”
“No,” she said. Her eyes wagged cautiously back and forth between us. “No, I see them often for a time. Then they become very busy and I never see them again. My uncle says it happens, that people get swept up.” She had begun nervously picking at the tattered embroidering on the cuff of her sleeve. “It’s dreadfully rude, I think, but Uncle Dorian says the girls he brings are troubled. We try to care for them. We do. He must mean well. It’s how Uncle Dorian is, you know, about funny people.”
A breeze sank through the hole in the doors and carried the lively scent of orange trees into the cellar. Fritzi was close behind me again. “What do you mean by funny people?” she asked.
“You know, funny in the head?” Candy covered a small yawn with the tips of her fingers. “I suppose sick people, by common definition, but that’s not how Uncle Dorian sees it. I don’t quite know how I see it. I’m a bit funny in the head, myself, so I hope you don’t think I’m being cruel or vulgar. Would you care for something to eat?”
I was so close to Fritzi I could feel her breath in my hair. Candy ignored our silence and set to retrieving a handful of neapolitan coconut sweets from her vanity drawer and placing it on the bedspread. She sat next to the pile and looked at us with polite expectation. “Uncle Dorian’s taught me so much about the spiritual senses. They go without much consideration these days, we’ve grown so cynical, but they’re always there, shadowing the cognitive, whispering from the other side of the veil. Uncle Dorian says the veil is quite porous and sheer for some people.”
She unwrapped a coconut square and chewed at it with dainty nips of her front teeth, perfectly timed in quick, clean intervals like a tightly wound automaton. “You look shocked. I don’t mean possession or humours, or anything so medieval. It’s like what that philosopher said, that scientifically speaking, there’s no distinction between the man who eats little and sees Heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes. He was being facetious, but Uncle Dorian takes it quite seriously. He’s got a real fascination for people like that, I think the snake-seers in particular. Probably why he’s so bloody paranoid about it all, always telling me not to lose my temper or bad spirits will shroud me all over.”
Candy paused. She examined herself, abruptly, and brushed her hand down the front of her dress, sweeping away a faint scrim of dust. “I’m embarrassed. I’ll simply say it. I would never normally look like this with company. My uncle sent you to spend the afternoon today? You’re quite sure?”
Fritzi’s palm was a damp chill against mine. I felt it tighten. The raw wounds over my hand stung from her grip and caused a tremor up my arm.
“What are those?” she asked.
Resting on Candy’s pillow was a collection of cowrie shells.
Candy glanced over her shoulder. “I was fiddling with them while you were banging at my door. I read them when I’m nervous. I’m sure you can tell I read them a fair bit.”
“My friend’s grandmother reads cowrie shells,” I said. “Who taught you?”
“My uncle.” Candy arranged the shells in a meticulous line beside the coconut squares. “He spent a summer in West Africa, before Aunt Apollina died. Studied Voodoo, and Yoruba. I’d never heard of them before. I can read bones, too.” She brought her feet up behind her on the bed. Her heels were cut, neatly, in sharp red slits. “You throw them. The shells.” She blinked up at us, plucking a shell between two fingers. “You see how there are two sides, a flat side with a slit through it and all of these teeth? And then this side.” She ran her finger over the smooth, leopard-spot curve.
My pulse took on a heavy, hypnotic rhythm, and I stared in a daze at the scars on the inner sides of her fingers, each one small and round and hollow.
Candy followed my eye and gathered her hands on her lap. “I can go in the house whenever I want, you know.” Her voice had soured. “I don’t expect you to understand. None of you ever do. You come in here thinking your ways are all figured out, but they stick your brain with needles out there, I’ve seen it.”
“No one’s trying to hurt you.” Fritzi was in front of me now, leaning imploringly toward Candy.
I moved closer to them and something sharp bit through my thin sandal. I looked down at a tiny, shattered sliver of mirror lost in the rug.
The room’s filth crystallized all at once. The linens, soured yellow in the creases, a clamouring desperation of dirty fingerprints smudged on the walls, only that cattycorner mirror tacked unsullied onto the whole mess, hanging at its hurried slant.
Sunlight crept in from the jagged hole in the doors.
“Wait, now.” Candy receded into the safety of her bed. “Do I know you?”
Blood poured away from my face in a cold wash, but she was looking at Fritzi.
“I see it now. I know that face,” Candy said. “It’s the mouth, and the nose.”
There was a miserable stench in the room. It had curdled in my nose and slowly become prevalent. “Smells like a dead dog in here.” I said it almost to myself; it was what Daddy always said.
“Hush,” Fritzi said. “What face, Candy? Who do you mean?”
“The girl who came to visit,” she said. “She had a face like yours.” Candy began rubbing her throat, brow compressed in a bout of confusion. “My uncle sent you?”
“Who was she? What was her name?” Fritzi grabbed Candy’s arm, squeezing like she could bleed her memories out of her. “When did you last see her?”
A voice hollered Candy’s name across the yard.
“Candy, you reckon you can explain this?” It was Leopold. His shoes scuffled against the wood, assessing its brutalized planks.
I looked up to where his voice spiralled down from the split in the doors. His silhouette stood as a dark burn against the sky, the sun bearing down behind him.
I expected Candy to scream, with my sister’s nails dug into her arm, but instead her eyes veered toward me, and the
same knowing look from the swamp dried all of the light from her face.
Chapter 21
“THEY HEARD ME screaming. Some silly night-scare.” Candy sat on the chair by her vanity, ordering her hairpins into a line. She had left the shells on her bed and their puckered mouths grimaced up at me.
“Thought she was burning alive,” Fritzi said.
Leopold licked his lips. “What were y’all even doin’ in this part of town?”
“What business is it of yours?” Fritzi asked.
“Just seems like lately I been seein’ you in all the places you don’t belong.”
Fritzi gave a petulant smirk. “Came lookin’ for your daddy.”
“I bet, with your faces painted up all pretty like that.”
We had managed to get close to the stairs before Leopold climbed through the butchered doors and lumbered down. He stood now on the last step, barricading us with one hand against the wall, the other on the railing.
Frightened as I knew she was, Fritzi crossed her arms and mustered our mother’s look of chronic boredom. I could tell she did not know what to do, not any more than I did, and they had to have been drilling through her head, same as mine, all of the questions Leopold was keeping us from asking.
The stairs mewled dustily under Leopold’s shoes. “Sit down a spell,” he said. “You came all the way out here.”
We did not move. The skeleton mask from his closet was scrunched in his fist, and he caught me staring at it. He looked to it, then to me.
“Must have given you quite the scare the other day, I reckon. I couldn’t sew to save my life, but Candy here made it for me, didn’t you, Can?”
Candy continued lining up her pins.
“Come on, now, Can, speak up.”
She nodded. “Yes. I sewed it myself.”
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