Between, Georgia

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “Oh, shut the fuck up, Bernese,” I said, and I sank down on Mama’s other side. I drew my heart on her shoulder, and she made my name sign and then clutched at me. I rocked her, my arms wrapping around her over Genny’s arms. She started signing, shaping Gone, all gone, gone again and again. I tried to give her my hands, to sign to her, to tell her about her animals, but she ignored my hand and kept rocking, signing almost to herself.

  I realized I had forgotten to put back the head I had chosen for Bernese’s buyer. I let go of Mama long enough to dig down deep into my purse. Sure enough, I found the box with Josephine’s head and hands inside, carefully wrapped and labeled. I’d been so distracted that I’d been walking around for days with a museum piece worth thousands of dollars stuffed in the bottom of my handbag. I pushed the box into Mama’s hands, and she clutched it, instantly recognizing the familiar size and texture of the box.

  She turned it in her hands until she found the label and then ran her fingers down the Braille, her lips shaping a loose and silent word. Genny relaxed her grip and sat up straighter, staring at the box.

  You forgot to put her back, Mama signed. Josephine.

  I nodded into her hands, and while I had her attention, I signed quickly, And Henry Crabtree got some of your animal dolls off the carousel. It isn’t much, I know.

  Mama took a deep breath and clutched the lone box, shuddering. Tears were streaming unchecked down her face. I pressed close into her side and sat quietly with her while she wept, Genny leaning into her other side. Mama rocked the box as if it were a baby, her arms folding all the way around it to hold herself.

  Another car was coming up Philbert. The headlights were shining our way, making me squint until they abruptly clicked off.

  Bernese had stalked away while I was talking with Mama, but she reappeared out of the crowd and came over to me. “The cops say there’s two more Crabtrees loose around somewhere. They got gas right across the street and torched everything in this world that matters to your mama and me. Everything that matters in this world.”

  I buried my head in my hands. “When is this going to stop?”

  Jonno squatted down beside me on the curb and put one hand on my shoulder. I lifted my head long enough to push his hand off me. I saw Bernese note the motion, but she said nothing.

  The car I’d seen was Trude’s old Packard. I saw her running up Philbert toward us. Her whole face seemed composed of circles, her eyes stretched as round as quarters, her mouth open in a wide O of surprise. She was heading straight toward us.

  Bernese saw her, too. “Perfect. My sister gets eaten, my other sister loses her life’s work, my store burns down, and Trude gets to show up just in time to have the vapors.”

  Trude came clattering up, staring wildly from the blazing Dollhouse Store to my face and then back again. She leaned down and grabbed my arm so hard I felt her grip all the way to my bone.

  She jerked me to my feet. Her face was inches from my own.

  “Ivy called my machine, said the square was on fire,” she panted. “She hung up before I could get to it. Tell me you got Fisher out of there.”

  “Fisher’s safe at home in bed,” Bernese snapped.

  At the same time I said, “Got her out of where?”

  “The store!” said Trude. “Bernese’s store!”

  “Fisher’s not in there,” Bernese said.

  “She was,” Trude said to Bernese. She yanked on my arm.

  “Did you get my message?”

  “Message?” I said. Something black and tarry was grasping at my heart, pulling it downward in my chest.

  “On your cell?” Trude said, frantic.

  I turned to Bernese. “You saw Fisher at home? Right before you came down here?”

  Bernese nodded. “Isaac called and told me what was going on.

  I was in a hurry to get down here, but I peeked in. She was snug as a bug in her bed. I left Lou at home in case she woke up.”

  “No,” said Trude. “She was night-walking. I saw her go in the store.”

  My heart was swelling, and the tarry fingers on it levered it down into my gut, pressing the breath out of me. “Call Lou,” I said.

  Bernese, looking alarmed now, pulled her cell phone out of her bag and hit the speed dial for home. I counted through the twenty endless seconds it took Lou to pick up.

  Bernese said, “Hey, it’s me. Trot on down the hall and look in on Fisher.” We waited another small eternity, and then the side of Bernese’s mouth quirked up and she nodded. “That’s what I thought.” She held the phone away from her face and said to me,

  “Safe in bed.”

  Trude’s death grip eased, and I wrenched my arm away from her and grabbed the phone. “Lou?” I said. “Lou, go pull the covers back.”

  “I’ll wake her,” he said.

  “Just do it.” I was practically screaming. Trude was pulling at her lower lip, and Bernese’s eyes were on my face.

  “All righty,” said Lou, and I waited what must have been a million years, an ice age, for him to cross the room. There was a moment of baffled silence, and then Lou said, “Oh my goodness.” And I knew.

  I couldn’t know, and I didn’t want to. I hurled the phone away from me and heard it clatter and crack in the road.

  “Nonny?” said Bernese from very far away. She sounded both scared and uncertain. I looked at the store, and it seemed to my eyes to be a solid block of fire, but that didn’t matter. It was all very easy and clear. Fisher was in there, and I had to go get Fisher.

  I started running, thinking this was all very simple: I would go in there and I would get Fisher, Fisher who hated to be held, and she would struggle and be irritated, so I would have to take her out on piggyback. I would bring her down the stairs and out the door and they would put an oxygen mask on her like Henry and she would say, “It was hot in there,” and it would all be fine.

  I could not feel my feet hitting the earth as they took me toward the store. I thought I heard someone say “Miss?” Other people were yelling things like “Hey” and “Stop” and “You can’t.”

  But I could. I would.

  I came even with the fountain, flying toward Fisher, flying to reach into all that liquid flame and lift her out of there, perfect and whole and perfectly herself, and then something slammed into my side, and the ground rose up to meet me and I plowed hard into it.

  “Nonny, no,” croaked Henry Crabtree, and I twisted in his arms, beating at him, hitting his face where Teak had hit him. I hit him hard and again and then again, but he didn’t let go of me.

  He was about my size but so amazingly strong. So much stronger.

  I couldn’t understand how he could be so strong, how he could hold me down so easily when I was this mighty. I was so invinci-ble it was obvious that I could go into the mass of flames and pluck my girl out if only he would let go of me. But he wouldn’t.

  So I fought him, trying to scratch his eyes out of his head, and he was saying “No” to me, but there could not be a no. There could only be Fisher, and only I could go and get her.

  Then we heard a crack like the spine of the world breaking, and I stopped fighting him long enough to look up at the burning store, at the place where Fisher was, and the crack was the roof falling in and smashing her, and then more cracks as the walls crumbled and fell in, folding up the store on top of her, burying her, and at last the brick front of the store tottered inward and fell whole on top of it all, like a lid closing, and Fisher was gone.

  “Get off me,” I said to Henry. I was limp beneath him, and he did what I said.

  There was a terrible noise inside me, and I couldn’t think over this terrible noise. I looked back toward Bernese and saw she had dropped to her knees, gray-faced, and Trude was beside her weeping, and I could make no sense of it over the noise in my head.

  I saw Mama, too, standing with Genny by the Marchants.

  Genny was as white as paper, but I knew her first rule. If it happened in front of Mama, Genny never lie
d. Never. I saw her hands moving. I saw what she was telling Mama, telling her in a language I knew, and I could not stand to see what she was saying, as if her sign might make it so.

  Mama was shaking her hands no, and no again, emphatic, absolute, but Genny wouldn’t stop signing it.

  And then the sound that was roaring nonstop in my head came out, and everyone could hear it. It was coming out of Mama.

  Mama made the sound and it was like a living siren of white noise, an unearthly keening. It wasn’t bearable to have this noise both in me, radiating outward to push against my skin, and also coming from my mama to press against the shell of me. I couldn’t be where this noise was. I turned and ran toward the church.

  I heard someone say, “No, I’ll go,” and someone was with me, some blurred shape of a person. I kept running through the night, back behind the church until my car was in front of me and the outside noise was far away from me and may have stopped, but the inside noise was relentless. I put my hands against the car door and leaned on it.

  The person behind me spoke, and it was Jonno. He said,

  “Baby,” and a stranger in me reared up and said, “Get the fuck away from me. I’ll kill you.” And then some time went by, and time kept going. Time wouldn’t stop and the world did not have Fisher in it. “Get the fuck away from me,” I said again. When I turned back, there was nothing there and no one there to see.

  I got in my car and made it start, and I made it be going, moving me away, but the noise was moving with me, vibrating in my chest, in my head, shaking every limb. The air in the car was made of salt and ashes, and I put the car in gear and tore toward the exit, wanting only to get far enough away so that it would be quiet. But I knew it wouldn’t be. The noise was in me, going with me, and the only thing I was driving away from was Mama, who would need me.

  I slammed on the brakes, and the car jerked to a halt and shuddered and died. There was a rolling thump from the backseat, the only thing I could hear over the bad sounds in my brain, and then, piping through, clear and high and sweet-pitched as a bell, Fisher’s dour, small voice said, “Ow.”

  I sat very still, and then I turned around and got to my knees, peering over the seat. And there she was.

  She was cocooned in a blanket she had taken from the rental property over the store, and a pillow was under her. All I could see of her was her round face, blinking up at me from where she had tumbled. Fisher fought the blanket until one perfect pale hand emerged to scrub at her eyes. “You got back?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and then I added, “Hi.”

  “Hi,” she said. I was afraid to touch her. I was afraid she wouldn’t be her solid self, real and alive. I watched as she fought and twisted her way out of the blanket, kicking free and then boosting herself back up to the backseat.

  “Why are you in my car?” I said.

  “I didn’t want you to leave town again while I was sleeping.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” I said.

  Her lower lip poked out. “Yes, you would, too.”

  I shook my head and said, so careful, “Do you think you could come up here for a minute.”

  She stood up and leaned toward me, letting her stomach rest on the lip of the front seat, and then she slithered over, slipping down to fall into my waiting arms.

  I couldn’t help it. I pulled her into me so close and tight, burying my nose in her hair to breathe her in.

  “You’re squashing me,” she said, muffled against my chest.

  “I’m keeping you,” I said to her. “You are mine and you should come and live with me. I am keeping you. Would you like that?”

  “Yes,” she said, and she relaxed into me, letting herself be squashed for once. Some time went by, and it was all right, time could go again, I would allow it, and I had a hard time not giggling as I gave the world permission to rotate on its axis.

  Fisher wormed backwards, away from me, until she was sitting beside me on the seat, perfectly contained in her whole, smooth skin.

  “I’m hungry,” she said. “I’m practically starved.”

  “We can fix that,” I said. I couldn’t stop looking at her, at how all the pieces of her fitted together exactly to make Fisher.

  She was looking down at her legs. She said, shyly, “Nonny? Is that true? About I can come live with you?”

  “Yes,” I said, even though I didn’t yet know how to make it happen.

  She said, “Because that was my secret wish. My real wish. The one that cost fifteen dollars.”

  “It will be true,” I said, and my voice was sure. I might not know how to make it happen, but I knew how to find out. “We have to go see everyone. People are worried. No one knew where you were, and you can’t ever do this again.”

  “Am I going to get a spanking?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “Not this time.” And then I heard myself adding with absolute sincerity, “I will kill anyone who tries to spank you.”

  Fisher nodded matter-of-factly. I left the stalled car right where it was, blocking the exit from the parking lot. Fisher and I got out, and I went around and took her hand. We started walking out of the parking lot, out onto Philbert Street first and then toward the square.

  “What’s happening?” said Fisher, staring big-eyed down the street at all the lights and vehicles and smoke.

  “Bunch of stuff,” I answered. “Don’t worry, everyone is okay.”

  I don’t know who saw us coming. I didn’t register it much at all. I heard the hum of joyful conversation and exclamation building as we came, but all I could see was Mama. She was sitting on the curb between Bernese and Genny. They were lined up in a row like the three monkeys, Bernese and Genny weeping into their hands and Mama between them, her hands folded quietly around the box in her lap, seeing and hearing and speaking no evil for all of them.

  Genny looked up, tear-stained and trembling, and she said,

  “Oh, Bernese! Oh, Bernese!” Bernese looked up and her face was made of clay, a sagging death mask. Then she saw Fisher beside me as we came walking staunchly hand in hand, and she burst out crying again and turned to Isaac, who was sitting beside her, and she collapsed onto him.

  Genny held her hands up, but there were no words in English or in sign for what she had to say. There was no way to tell Mama except to pick up Fisher, to swing her up into my arms and then to put her, all of her, into my mother’s lap. I watched my mother’s arms close around her, watched her feel and understand the shape and smell of what was being given back to her. The box with Josephine in it teetered and then tumbled off her legs into the road, and Mama let it go, hugging Fisher tight against her.

  I knelt in front of her in the road and put my arms around both of them. Fisher, smashed in between us, was protesting, but I ignored her as we held her safe and living between us.

  Bernese and Genny were hovering, and after a few minutes, Bernese reached in between us and dragged Fisher out to smother her in hugs while Genny patted and dabbed at any piece of Fisher she could reach.

  “You people are bothering me,” Fisher wailed.

  I picked up the box with Josephine’s head and offered it to Mama, but she pushed it away. I set it down beside us, and then I gave my mother my hands and said the best part of our love story back to her. I gave her the words she had given me so many times when she was telling me how we found each other.

  I signed to her, That baby is my baby. I know it. I don’t know how to do it, how to keep her. But you do.

  My mother’s searching hands reached out and found my face, stroked gently down my cheeks.

  Good girl, she signed. Good girl, good girl. And then she nodded her hand. She would tell me how.

  CHAPTER 20

  IHAD TO wait for an opportunity to put Mama’s plan into action. It had to arise on its own. It was easy to be patient, however, because Fisher was staying with me at Mama’s house for now. Bernese was hip deep in a battle with the insurance companies over her store and the museum and engaged in a separate
war with the judicial system.

  Teak and Jimmy were already back in Alabama. Teak was in jail for parole violations, but Jimmy was home in Jackson’s Gap; apparently, there was no law against passing out on a sofa while your half brothers try to burn up a town. Grif was in custody, but they hadn’t found Billy. Billy Crabtree always seemed to land on his feet, and this time he had hit the ground running. Bernese was all over the A.D.A. who caught the file, agitating for a coun-trywide manhunt and trying to make sure Grif wasn’t offered bail.

  I used her distraction to put Get Fit, Kid! through her paper shredder. Fisher, let off the chain, spent three days eating herself sick, voraciously stuffing in junk until I thought she’d swell up like a tick and pop. I let her. I said nothing as she ravaged an entire bag of Doritos and licked all the frosting and sugar off half a box of donuts. I even kept my mouth shut when she threw each naked pastry back into the box, shriveled and slightly damp.

  But by the time a week was out, she had settled and started asking for real food. She still agitated for Cap’n Crunch but accepted Kix, negotiated a certain number of bites of broccoli, and asked for candy twice as often as she was allowed to have it. In other words, she was acting and eating like a normal little kid.

  On the square, workmen were clearing out the debris from the burned-out shells of Bernese’s and Henry’s stores. I went down there one day during school hours. I kicked around in the rubble from the museum, but if there had been something salvageable, how would I recognize it? I quit digging and dusted off my hands.

  There was nothing here I could save, nothing I could learn.

  As I walked back toward Philbert, one of the workmen behind me let out a wolf whistle. I was wearing my tightest jeans and a turquoise knit top that always made me feel pretty. I grinned at the sound; I was going to see Henry Crabtree, and I needed the affirmation.

  Henry had been staying down at Ona’s. I hadn’t talked to him since the night of the fire. Part of it was that I had Fisher all the time, and Henry was hung up with insurance companies, too.