by Kit Reed
The aunts are scared of it because shadows. Plus, certain people in cars slow down to pick certain things up from these guys, handing off whatever they have to pay to get what they want, and I don’t know if it’s mollies or heroin or what. I don’t need any, at least I don’t think I do, but I could start a conversation by asking if they had weed and if my five would get me a joint that I could take to Dell, like, if I came to his place under the porch with a present, he’d have to let me in.
It’s not like any of these guys even notice me, so I hang around and hang around trying to figure out how to start. After a while, I just stand there pretending to bond with them thinking just maybe they’ll decide I’m OK and it can start. It doesn’t, but it beats the hell out of going home. Then another car comes along May Street and it’s way too familiar, that little red … Noooo! And, shit! My mom slows down and rolls down the street-side window and leans across the seat. One of the guys starts over to the car to, like, hand her something and I think, Oh no, Mom. Not you!
Then she shouts, and that shout sends all those guys back into the shadows under the banyan, “OK for you, Theodore Upchurch Hale. Get in.”
“I’m sorry!” I’m sweating-hot and shaky after I get in, trying too hard to explain. “I just couldn’t stand another…”
“Shut up,” she said, “We’re going to Staples,” and that’s all she said.
Staples again. In this big ugly, empty town going to Staples is like coming home. Everything pretty much like they had it when we lived in Deland. Ever since she found out about the no money, Mom has been here a lot. After the workstation and the laptop, we had to go back for a printer and a big pack of paper, with Mom praying that she gets some job before the bill comes in. She brought home the printer, all right, and it works fine. The trouble is, after, like, a hundred copies of her resume, the demo cartridge that came with the printer ran out, one of those things they don’t tell you before you leave the store. Either that, or she thought she’d get a job and we could come back and buy a whole box of them.
Staples is an extremely cool place. If I could do it without upsetting Lane, I’d find an unoccupied corner and move in for good. Part of me wants to grab one of the shiny new phones off the display so I can get the Internet in my room, but no. Your mom would freak. Look at her, popping that printer cartridge into her cart. String it out, Lane. This is a hell of a lot homier than 553.
It’s like she knows what I am thinking. When we head for the checkout counter, there’s a line; she looks at me. “This is taking too long. Maybe we should go to Baskin-Robbins and come back afterward. What do you think?”
I pretend to be looking at Moleskine books, we could afford a small one, or I could, with a little help. I give her The Smile. “I’m cool. Take your time.”
She looks so little standing there, with her one small item in that big red cart. “OK then.” Then she gets to browsing, just like me.
I think she’s looking for something in particular, I don’t know what, so I wander off into the computer section thinking maybe one of the demo models is hooked up to the Internet and I can check out Barry’s YouTube channel, so I go along trying keyboards one at a time, on down the aisle to the back of the store and, weird. Down at the tippy end, hunched over so I can’t see what he’s doing, it’s Dell Duval.
I’m like, “Yo,” and Dell looks up at me with this confusing smile.
He looks different out here in the daylight. I’ve only ever seen him back there underneath the porch, where it’s so dark that you can’t really tell what a person’s like. My mom only saw him that one time, the day she got the new workstation, so it’s not like she knows him like I do. Workstation Day he was gone before I came outside to help and the aunts made Vincent come over and help us get the thing into the house. Vincent is nice, but he’s a little weird. He turns up whenever there’s heavy lifting, but in an odd way, it’s like he was never there.
Now, Dell, Dell is something else. In the daytime, he looks a lot nicer than I thought he was when I found him under our back porch. When he sees that it’s me, he turns halfway and gives me this big you-can-trust-me smile. As it turns out he has equally trust-me color eyes, but he doesn’t exactly straighten up right away. First, he finishes buttoning up his flannel shirt, like it’s important to do this before I get too close. And hey, the part where his abs should be looks straight up and down and flat like he’s hiding something. Which he is.
Then he grins for real, and says, like he’s really glad to see me, “Theo. This is cool.”
“OK…”
“Really. You’re just in time.”
I’m not going to ask him, in time for what. I’ll make him tell me.
“I need you to do something for me,” he says finally. We are laying out the terms for an agreement. “OK?”
“OK.”
“OK.” Now we are talking man to man, like, with respect. He jerks his head at an old guy in the store T-shirt, the only one in this section. “Could you tell him you want to check out the new Apple watch?”
“Like…” Weird. I would do anything for him. I don’t want another father, I had one, and he turned out to be a pisser. I just want him to be my friend.
“It won’t take long.”
And I don’t want him to spell it out for me. I go, “Right.” Create a diversion. “OK, cool.”
He goes, “Thanks, I owe you,” and if Dell is gone by the time me and the clerk are done inspecting the new gadget that we don’t want and if I did, the gadget that we have no way of paying for, that’s cool too.
So Mom finds me talking to the clerk and she’s so happy that I’ve found someone to talk to that we pretty much marvel over the demo and when he’s done we thank him nicely and quit the store. Then it’s a hop, skip and a jump to Baskin-Robbins, and the next time I go out the back porch steps way and Dell is home, even without the house present, he and I are tight now. He owes me, we both know it, I just need to give him time to set up. Then I can go down to his place and check in on his Internet or else. It won’t take long and as soon as that’s over, I’ll bring out the Ghirardelli bar Mom got me when she paid for the printer cartridge, and we can hang out.
As soon as I get in the house she pounces. Cold breath on the back of my neck. You and that dirty boy.
There are no boys here, lady. Just men, and we are in this together.
Take that, Mormama. All right for you.
CHAPTER 16
Lane
We were driving home from Baskin-Robbins in San Marco when my boy Theo dropped this odd, off-beat sentence in the air. The kind that makes mothers worry. It was so nice hanging out with him that when we left Staples, I drove over to San Marco instead of going to the one down town. We were on our way back over the river to May Street when the afternoon turned into rush hour and we ended up stuck on the bridge.
Theo just started. “She said look underneath the mattress in Sister’s room.”
“Who did?”
He wouldn’t answer. I knew that look.
The car in front of us moved a half-yard. We moved a half-yard. We were going to be here a while, so I leaned on him. I knew what he was trying to tell me, and I needed him to know it too. “I said, who was it?”
Then he got all congested and weird. “Not sure.”
“OK then, where did you hear this? Were you spying on the three witches?”
“What?”
“You know, Macbeth. The aunts!”
“Not really.”
“Then who?”
Egregious shrug. “It’s not important.”
If the traffic hadn’t de-clogged just then I would have pulled over and shaken it out of him. Then we could get down to it. Mormama. One more reason to leave that miserable house for good. “Dammit, Theo, where do you get this stuff?”
His face went eight ways to Sunday and he yelled, “I overheard it!”
We were close to the end of another long day in Jacksonville, forgive me, I snapped. “Just say it, Theo. D
on’t jerk me around.”
I was working when the twins came banging on the bedroom door this afternoon, semi-hysterical. Their “Teddy” was missing. Missing! A thousand horror movies flashed through my head while I searched the house and the dilapidated garage-cum-servants’ quarters out back, followed by worse scenarios as I got into the car: death by coral snake in one of the vacant lots on May Street, kidnap by sex offender, violation, certain death and no, that was not the worst.
Kidnap by estranged dad with the time and the money to take our boy anywhere and keep him there, and I might never get him back. That was the worst. I took off after my kid, planning to comb the neighborhood before I called the police; I was crazy with worry and ready to kill Barry, if it came to that.
Silly me. My boy Theo was out there on the corner playing like he was just one of the guys hanging out under the banyan tree across from the dinky corner store. When he saw me he flashed a big grin. As if he’d been waiting for me. He wasn’t hurt, he wasn’t anything, in spite of the aunts’ hysteria, so I kept it all in and made up this trip to Staples to keep from embarrassing him. All that plus a chocolate chip cookie dough shake in San Marco, and he came at me with this cryptic thing.
His hair stood up in peaks the way it does when he can’t let go. “Just go look under the fucking mattress, Mom.”
Yes I yelled. “Where is this coming from??”
My only son yelled back. “It’s not like you’d believe me. She did, OK? Just look under the mattress in Sister’s room.”
“Why should I do that?”
Then his voice went cold and still. He set down the words like cement blocks, evenly spaced, with careful attention to each one. “Because she said so.”
No need to ask him who. We both knew. “Oh, shit.”
“Yeah, shit.” He looked relieved. “She says it’s about us.”
“You know this is a lot of nothing, right?”
“That’s what she told me, Mom.”
“OK, I promise.” In the morning, show him the empty spot and forget it. “Now let it go.”
“Just do it, OK?”
That night, after the aunts went to bed and Theo was stashed in his stairway cabin, unlikely to show up and say I told you so, I looked. I lifted the mattress in the sacred Sister’s room, unleashing the dust of the ages. First I thought I was right: ancient ticking, leaking stuffing, nothing to see here, Theo. There is no Mormama, just let it go. I looked and there’s nothing to see.
Then there was. The notebook had a leather cover, with heavy rag paper in eight- or ten-page signatures sewn in by hand long before machines did these things. Instead of lines, the pages were scored like pages in a ledger, at least half of them filled with neat, self-conscious schoolgirl script: that finishing-school flourish that girls made before Theo and I were even imagined, with the tails on each y and g in the text truncated, as though the writer had taken special care, steadying her hand with a wooden ruler as she wrote, word by word, with careful attention to making them march in line.
At my back, something stirred. I turned on her. “All right for you, Mormama. I found the damn book. Now, beat it.”
And so she spoke to me directly. You know I can’t.
CHAPTER 17
THIS BOOK BELONGS TO LEAH ELLIS
July 18, 1919
I am tired of bed.
Tillie says I was half dead and sobbing when they brought me upstairs, honey, you were in no condition, you was all torn up and crying like to die.
When I ask her why I’m still here she says, Miss Leah, you had a terrible horrible awful time down there in the old laundry room! When they carried you inside after, your mama took one look and she called me in from the kitchen and she say “Tillie, you take this child upstairs and put her right straight to bed.” Child, you was sobbing so hard!
“Poor girl, I can’t bear it,” Miss Manette said, but I think she couldn’t bear to think about it. She tell me, “After a thing like that, you need to rest your soul!”
As if Mama thinks I really have a soul, when she treats me like something that the cat dragged in. Mama didn’t put me to bed because it happened, she did it because she thinks it serves me right.
She thinks I went down there all fluffy-ruffle and excited in spite of all her warnings about terrible things that happen inside your body, that I went down in the undercroft looking for trouble, and that is how I brought it on myself. On her way in here to see me, she scolds in case they’re listening: “You did this, Miss Girl, taking to your bed with the shades down and no visitors,” but I know different and so does she.
At first she said, “Don’t cry, sweetheart, it’s only ’til you get well,” but after Dr. Woods came, that changed. Mama told them that I had scarlet fever; she said I was in quarantine and no one was allowed, she said she had to protect her darlings, so I guess I wasn’t her darling any more, although she says it’s for my own good. I thought it was just ‘til I got over it. What Happened. She never let on that I was locked in here for good.
Mama was in the kitchen that night when Vincent carried me inside; when I was late for dinner and they couldn’t find me, Mama sent Vincent to search the house and the yard. He came hunting in the bushes between our house and the Dawsons when he heard the faintest sound, I was hurt and trying not to sob; I tried so hard to hold still, so we wouldn’t be found. Then Vincent would leave and we could stay together, but the first time hurt so much I just couldn’t hold it in, so Vincent heard.
He came crashing in on us when all I wanted was to be left alone while I got used to the terrible first pain of real love.
Mama was furious! She made Vincent carry me up the back stairs with a blanket over my head so nobody could see because I was ruined; she didn’t look at me, she just decided. “Ruined,” she said, and glowered until Vincent put me down in the guest bedroom. “In the undercroft. Defy the Lord and the Lord punishes you! This is our secret,” she said to me, grinding her mouth into my ear, whispering through those teeth. “As far as they know you fell down the back steps and hurt yourself, so foolish! You are broken in several places, foolish girl,” she said, although I was torn in only the one, “and you will stay in bed until there is no trace.” She glared and Vincent and Tillie faded away. “This is the devil’s work. Nobody must ever know.”
Mama says she’s keeping me close so she can take care of me, when Tillie and I know that Tillie does all the taking care. Breakfast, lunch and supper on a nice tray, all the sponge baths and the chamber pot and clean underthings and a clean nightgown every mortal day. Mama hardly ever comes. She told me that I have to stay in bed because I’m an hysteric, but that’s a lie. I haven’t cried out loud since it happened, Mama, and I know you ordered Tillie to spy on me.
Why am I still here?
I am tired of bed.
* * *
I was sobbing because it hurt, he loved me, but it hurt so much! He was gone and I knew he wouldn’t be back because he jumped up the minute I cried out. He didn’t mean to hurt me, but, Lord, there was blood. I couldn’t help it, I screamed! Oh hush, he said, sweet darling, please hush, but I couldn’t. Then we heard them stamping down the back steps from the kitchen and before I knew it my dearest Laury was gone, kicking out the lattice between us and the yard next door and Vincent found me alone in the wood room at the bottom of Mama’s sacred perfect house, crying to break my heart. I was sobbing so hard that I couldn’t speak, so it’s my fault that they thought the worst.
They thought I was forcibly defiled, but it was love! We were in love, and when I lay down with Laurence Archambault that night I just knew we would run away and get married; I thought my sweet boy would take me away with him that very night. He’d carry me off to some beautiful place far away from Jacksonville Florida and we’d live like prince and princess until our wedding day; I thought Papa loves me, he’ll understand, I thought he would mollify Mama and she would give us their blessing, and I thought they’d rejoice to see Mama’s disappointing one girl too many, he
r very last baby, all settled down in a nice new place with her handsome prince.
All that was before Laury and I lay down together in the beautiful, soft night. He brought a quilt to make us comfortable, and before the time in our love when he stopped running his fingers through my hair and whispering into the soft skin above my ear, before he slid those sweet fingers down my neck and on down into my unmentionables and on down— at first it felt so good but even then, in the mean, inner soul of me, the guilty part that I can’t get shut of, I knew that what we were doing was bad.
Evening prayers from the cradle into my seventeenth year, and now this. I said Laury I love you forever, but we have to stop. We had to stop, we did! But he didn’t hear. Then I shouted, Stop! But my Laury went on nuzzling and stroking, he kept on even after I began to scream because he was doing things to me that made me want to do them back to him and keep on doing it even though good-bad Leah knew that part of me was about to tear, I was too caught up in what we were doing to care that upstairs they were calling me; then it tore; we were still moving, I needed it, but forgive me, I screamed that scream and seconds before Vincent came into the undercroft calling, my Laury jumped up. He crashed out through the latticework between our wood room and the Dawsons’ carriage house before I could cry, don’t stop! I was gasping so hard that no words came out when Vincent picked me up and carried me out through the hole that my dear, lost Laury had made in the trellis wall, and we were cold, standing there in the Dawsons’ side yard.
Mama thought I was sobbing because I was violated and torn, but I wasn’t, although that secret part of me hurt so bad. I was wailing because my Laury was gone and before I could try to explain or say anything that would stop it, Vincent carried me up the back stairs quickly, bump bump bump, while there was nobody around but Mama to see.
Vincent told her something terrible had happened, even though next to Papa, she was the last one I wanted to know.