by Dara Horn
Sara knew that it was a matter of time before Ben woke up, heard them talking, and broke the magic circle. But for that reason the moment had to be seized. She listened for a second, trying to hear if Ben might be in the hall behind her. But she heard nothing but blank sounds, crickets rustling the air outside and the buzz of her brother turning in his sleep. She took a few careful steps into the room. Then, watching her parents watch her, she asked, “Daddy, can I see your leg?”
Her parents froze. Sara watched as her mother’s face emptied of color, her lips and eyes drying up like the yellowed grass in the yard, parched and pale. A lock of her hair, loosened from its ponytail, fell down over her left eye. Her father lay motionless beside her, staring, balanced on his elbows behind him. Their two faces hung in the air like portraits framed on a wall. Her mother turned to look at her father, but he didn’t look back. Instead he looked at Sara, his eyebrows raised as if in fear.
Her father blinked twice and glanced down at his stump of a leg. The leg shuddered involuntarily, as she had sometimes seen it do before, beneath its sheath of pants. Sara saw it move and trembled along with it. Then her father pressed his hand down on his thigh, holding it down, kneading it with his thumb. The shuddering stopped. He looked back at her, forcing a smile.
“Sure, Sara. Come on up,” he said, patting the mattress alongside his leg. Her mother sat up beside him, her face empty and blank.
Sara pulled herself up on the foot of her parents’ bed, amazed by the wide expanse of mattress and sheets that stretched between her and them, the vast elevated continent where her parents slept. She moved cautiously across the mattress, pulling herself along the length of her father’s good leg—it was strange even to see her father’s good leg with its toes, weird long and hairy toes, with the second toe longer than the first, because her father almost never removed his socks and shoes—until she came close enough to see the other leg, with its strange, ugly bulge of darkened flesh.
It was mottled in color, red in some places and an almost bluish purple in others, with deep indentations in the skin, some of them nearly black, like cracks filled with dirt. The indentations traveled in a row, forming a ring around the limb near its end. The hair on his leg only began growing a few inches up from where the leg stopped, and even there his thigh was misshapen, concave on the sides where it should have been round. Like a bone. The thigh quivered again, and her father pressed down on it with his hand. She heard him swallow a groan.
Sara sat quietly for a few moments, looking. There had been a big storm the previous week, and a large branch from the tree in the yard next door had fallen down across their driveway. She had noticed the following day how horrible the rest of the tree had looked, severed and deformed, the place where the branch had fallen off now swollen into a damp, dark lump on the tree’s flesh. Maybe, she thought, her father had been out in a storm, or struck by lightning.
“Why is your leg like that?” she asked.
Her parents looked at each other. Her mother began to open her mouth, searching for words. But before she could speak, her father said, “I was in the jungle once, and a tiger bit my leg off.”
Sara stared at him, searching his face for a hint of a joke; she couldn’t find any. She was stunned. “Really?” she whispered.
Her father nodded, solemn. “Really! I was fighting with a tiger in the jungle, and he bit it right off.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Daniel, stop it,” her mother snapped, rolling over until she had turned away from him. As her mother moved, Sara noticed a dark line of curly fur along the inside edge of her mother’s underwear, peeking out while her mother shifted on the crumpled sheets. The sight of it disturbed her. Why were some people covered with fur?
Sara looked again at her father’s stump of a leg. Now she could see what she thought might be the teeth marks in the pinched, purple skin, on what would have been his knee. “Can I touch it?” she asked.
Her father hesitated, glancing at her mother. But her mother remained curled on her side, just barely turning her face to keep an eye on Sara. “Sure, if you want,” he said. He raised the stump slightly, and Sara heard her mother draw in her breath.
Sara trembled for a moment, and then reached out her hand. She touched it, first with her fingertips and then caressing it in her palm, running her hand along the distortions in the skin. She was surprised to find that it was warm, the skin thick and taut like her father’s palm. She traced her fingers along the dents in the flesh, and then caught a glimpse of her father’s other leg lying next to it, long and full, as if it belonged to a different person, lying beside him. Suddenly Sara felt a deep and heavy weight within her, a leaden pendulum swaying slowly as it settled in her chest. “I bet it hurt a lot,” Sara said softly.
“Yes, it hurt a lot,” her father answered, with a weariness she had never heard before, and clutched her hand. She knew then that it was true, all of it.
Her father released her hand and then shifted heavily on the bed, pulling himself up and balancing on one elbow to grab a box of cigarettes from his night table. He tapped one out, wedged it between his teeth, and turned back toward Sara, one hand still groping for the lighter. Sara’s mother turned over, sitting up beside him.
“Why did you go the jungle?” Sara asked.
Her mother looked at her father, and then suddenly yanked the cigarette out from between his spluttering lips and threw it on the floor. When she spoke, she looked at Sara, though it was clear that she was talking to her father. She curved her words to the side, throwing them at him. “That’s a really good question, Sara. I wonder if your dad can answer that question.” Now her mother turned to face him. “Dad, can you answer that question?” she asked. “Because I don’t think I know the answer.”
Her father forced a grin, looking at Sara, away from her mother. “To fight the tigers, of course,” he said.
“But the tigers won?” Sara asked.
A strange look crossed her father’s face, as if he had just bumped his foot against something. His eyes pinched into thin slits. It was a face he made frequently, Sara realized. Her mother sat up and took her by the shoulder. “Sara, you need to go to bed,” she said.
Sara curled up closer to her father, unwilling to break the magic circle. She shook her head. “What if tigers come to my room?” she asked, although she knew they wouldn’t.
“Tigers are not going to come to your room,” her father told her, his face relaxed again. “They only live in the jungle, remember?”
Her mother groaned as Sara clutched her father’s arm. “What if I have dreams about tigers?” she asked. She was afraid even to mention what she really feared, in case saying it might make it come true: What if she had dreams about legs, legs without people attached to them, legs wearing shoes, legs kicking at her bedroom door, legs running after her?
Her father opened his eyes, letting out a sharp breath. “You’re not going to have dreams about tigers,” he told her, holding her briefly before letting her go. “Go to sleep, kid.”
“Good night, Sara,” her mother said, leaning back, her eyes already closed.
Sara edged carefully off the bed and then walked slowly to the doorway. “Good night,” she repeated, closing the door behind her. When the door was fully closed, she walked down the hall as loudly as she could, slapping her bare feet against the floor. Once she had reached the door of her own room, she turned around and walked with quick, delicate steps back to her parents’ door and sat down silently behind it, leaning her head against the wooden frame.
“Daniel, you have to stop lying to the kids all the time,” she heard her mother say from inside the room.
She listened as her father coughed, a throaty wheeze that lasted too long. The mattress creaked. Sara pictured her father’s ruined leg brushing up against her mother’s thigh, and shivered. “What should I have said?” she heard her father answer, clearing his throat. He made a strange noise that Sara couldn’t quite identify, spitting maybe, and then h
is voice grew louder, almost shouting. “Tell me, Rosalie, what would you have me say? Something about the road? About the cave? About the trap? What would you prefer? Should I mention the shit they smeared on the spikes?”
“Quiet, she’s still here,” her mother whispered.
Sara held her breath, balancing her head on her knees. Perhaps if she thought hard enough she could become invisible, a pair of floating invisible ears. She waited, listening to her father listen.
“How do you know?” her father whispered back.
“They always stay,” her mother said, her voice warmer now. “Why don’t you put her to bed, King of Nightmares?” she asked. “We’ll be lucky if we hear about anything besides tigers for the rest of the year.”
Sara thought of running back to her room, but decided not to. Instead, she listened as her father moved, hearing him hoist himself out of bed and onto his metal crutches. When he reached the door, his legs newly covered with a pair of pale blue pajama pants and his chest still bare and furry above them, she stood and raised a hand. He offered her one of his fingers, the rest wrapped around the crutch, and she took hold of it. And the two of them walked on together.
Sara moved at her father’s side, matching his slow, three-legged pace, and wondered how she could ask what she wanted to ask. She looked at the right leg of his pajama pants alongside her, an empty flap hanging beside his right crutch, fluttering gently in the light that crept out from under her parents’ door, and she felt as though she could see through the cloth to the knotted knee beneath it. Her father’s good foot, its bare toes like long hairy fingers, pushed hard against the floor between the thump of his crutches.
“Should I be afraid of tigers?” she asked as they neared her room. Or of roads? she thought. Or of caves? Or of—what was it, a spike?
“No,” he said as they entered her room, “you should definitely not be afraid of tigers.”
He leaned his good leg against her bed, propping himself up with one crutch as he freed his other arm. Then he took her hand in his strong, warm palm as she climbed into bed. He sat down beside her, leaving the crutches leaning against the bed. “Good night, Sara,” he said softly. He leaned over and kissed her hair, and then slowly sat up, reaching for his crutches. Please, she thought, don’t leave.
“Sing the song about Mom,” Sara said.
Her father paused and brushed his fingers against her cheek, glancing toward the doorway in the dark room. Her twin brother was visible through the door across the hall, twisting in his sleep. “That would wake up Ben,” he whispered, his voice near the inside of her ear. The touch of his fingers against her cheek was so exquisite, like being wrapped in a silk blanket, like swimming in warmed water, like floating on a cloud.
“Sing the song,” she repeated.
“You’re too big for stuff like that, kid.”
His hand against her cheek reminded her of a game they often played, in which she would fill her cheeks with air and he would try to “pop” them, tapping one side of her face and then another, back and forth and back and forth, until she could no longer hold in her laugh. Suddenly, in the beauty of his hand on her cheek, Sara felt a seeping sense of dread, a still small voice telling her that this astounding sweetness might vanish at any moment, like breath released from the inside of her cheek, if she didn’t hold on to it as tight as she could.
“I won’t go to sleep until you sing the song.”
Her father sighed, a sigh that was not frustration or exhaustion but mere breath, thin and calm, like a cloud that vanishes, or a fading breeze. He leaned even closer to her, so close that his lips were almost resting on her ear. His breath stirred her skin. His out-of-tune voice, without any of his usual pauses for coughing or clearing his throat, floated into her head as if it were her own thoughts. The words, which Sara had heard hundreds of times, on hundreds of sleepless nights, were in Yiddish:
Shteyt zikh dort in gesele
Shtil, fartrakht, a hayzele
Drinen, afn boydem-shtibl
Voynt mayn tayer Reyzele!
Yedn ovnt farn hayzl,
Drey ikh zikh arum,
Kh’gib a fayf un ruf oys, Reyzl:
—Kum! Kum! Kum!
Standing in the little lane,
A little house, bemused and plain.
At the attic window, she’ll appear:
My Reyzele lives there, darling dear!
Each evening by this little house,
I pace and wander ’round,
I whistle and call to Reyzele:
“Reyzele, please come down!”
There is a moment that has happened over and over again, in every place children have ever slept, on every dark night for the past ten thousand years, that almost everyone who was once a child will forever remember. It happens when you are being tucked into bed, on a dark and frightening night when the sounds of the nighttime outside are drowned out only by the far more frightening sounds in your head. You have already gone to bed, have tried to go to bed, but because of whatever sounds you hear in your head you have failed to go to bed, and someone much older than you, someone so old that you cannot even imagine yourself ever becoming that old, has come to sit beside you and make sure you fall asleep. But the moment that everyone who was once a child will remember is not the story the unfathomably old person tells you, or the lullaby he sings for you, but rather the moment right after the story or song has ended. You are lying there with your eyes closed, not sleeping just yet but noticing that the sounds inside your head seem to have vanished, and you know, through closed eyes, that the person beside you thinks that you are asleep and is simply watching you. In that fraction of an instant between when that person stops singing and when that person decides to rise from the bed and disappear—a tiny rehearsal, though you do not yet know it, of what will eventually happen for good—time holds still, and you can feel, through your closed eyes, how that person, watching your still, small face in the darkness, has suddenly realized that you are the reason his life matters. And Sara would give her right leg and her left just to live through that moment one more time.
SARA’S MOTHER HAD not yet discovered the tomb when she announced to Sara one day after school that she was going to New York on an errand and wouldn’t be back until the evening. The announcement—which luckily came just minutes before Sara finished eating her after-school snack and proceeded as usual into the tomb—took Sara by surprise. Her mother hadn’t been to New York since Sara’s father died. When Sara asked what the trip was for, her mother simply sighed, “Business. Very boring, I promise.” Probably a meeting about one of the books she was illustrating, Sara figured. But Ben had stayed late at school for a science competition, and as her mother stepped out the door, Sara suddenly felt the entire empty house weighing down on her shoulders. It was one thing enclosing herself within the tomb when she knew her twin brother was suffering in his own new cage a few rooms away. But being alone in the house for hours was something else. When she heard her mother’s car starting up outside, she raced out, waving her arms in the driveway. Sara didn’t need to explain. Both of them had spent enough time alone already. Her mother stopped the car and let Sara in. They had already been on the highway for twenty minutes when Sara finally found the courage to ask, more specifically, why they were going to New York.
“To meet the person who bought the painting we’re selling,” her mother said, her eyes distant as she stared out at the road.
“What painting?” Sara asked. The “we” near the end of her mother’s answer surprised her. For a moment she panicked, thinking that someone had discovered the murals in the tomb.
“The painting from the living room, the little one with the man floating in the sky,” her mother said.
Sara thought of the painting, which was almost impossible to picture outside of where it hung in the living room. She used to look at it fairly often, since it was above the piano, but since her father died she had stopped playing. She couldn’t believe that it was gone. She g
lanced in the back seat, thinking that perhaps it had just been taken down now. But she wasn’t entirely surprised that it wasn’t there. She had been missing cues for a while at home, spending too much time in the tomb. “Someone is buying it?” she asked.
“Yes, a man from Russia is buying it.”
Sara looked at the road, confused. “So why are we going to New York?”
“Right now there’s a person there who has it, a man who buys and sells paintings. An art dealer,” her mother explained. “He’s been trying to sell it for me, and he found this person to buy it. Actually I already signed the papers, so it’s already sold.”
Sara looked at her mother. “So then why do we have to go?” she asked. Now she was annoyed, wishing she had stayed behind in the tomb.
Her mother sighed. “I just wanted to meet the buyer, because the buyer is only going to be in New York for today. He works for a Russian museum,” her mother said, her voice getting softer. “I wouldn’t have wanted to at all, except that that there was something I forgot when I gave the painting to the dealer. There were some—some papers stuck in the back of the frame. I was hoping the buyer would agree to give them back to me. Not the painting, just the papers. I just forgot to take them out before I…” She paused, blinked. “I told you it was boring,” she said quickly.