by Ilie Ruby
Still, Melanie would be cautious with her. She would walk on eggshells, for fear something would trigger it. But she would do what she had to, just to have her sister back. Melanie was actually looking forward to spending normal girl time together. She had rented a DVD of Seinfeld episodes and also the movie Fried Green Tomatoes, a real chick-flick. She had even bought two baskets of apples and some rhubarb so that they could bake crispy apple-rhubarb pie, Leila’s favorite, from scratch.
Carefully they sliced the fruit as the warming oven made their cheeks glowy. Their speech was measured at first, saying please and thank you, being generous with their compliments. But they soon fell into easy talk about how much they loved Leila, and how much they didn’t like their father, who had by this time been gone for years. It was one of the few times Melanie felt connected to her sister, close without the tight cord that seemed to shut Maya off from her. After everything she and Maya had been through, it was only important to step over the jealousy and resentment and just forgive.
This was what it was like to have a real sister, Melanie decided, as the fruit browned in the mixture of sugar and orange juice. They began to sing along with Bruce Springsteen on the radio. Maya started dancing as she pushed a fist of dough across a cheese grater so that the golden swivels fell out into the pie tin to make an even crust, Leila’s trick, and Melanie stirred the butter and crushed corn-flake topping with a wooden spoon. She wanted to let the moment carry them as far as it could, and she started singing into her spoon. Soon they were both dancing around the kitchen, pounding out a beat on the pots, on the linoleum floor, on the glass jars filled with raw macaroni pasta. Even Old Sally, usually more interested in sleep than play, got crazy and chased her tail.
When the song ended, they looked at each other, breathless. They held each other’s eyes for a moment, smiling through the hesitation. So what if they were always turning over new leaves? It didn’t matter.
The windows were closed, but suddenly, a rush of wind brushed their faces and the scent of lilacs permeated the air. The heavy bowl of syrupy mixture spun off the counter. Neither of the girls said what they were thinking as they watched the bowl topple across the floor. Apple and rhubarb slices stuck like big brown grubs on the linoleum. Maya looked up nervously at Melanie. “It’s all your fault.”
“No big deal,” Melanie said. “We’ll just make more. You slice this time, okay?” asked Melanie, becoming Leila as she wiped up the mess, just as she had watched Leila do so many times under Victor’s impatient glare. “See, no biggie,” she said, her voice chirpy, and in that moment she felt she understood her mother completely.
After, when they went upstairs to get ready for bed, they found silky spaghetti-strap nightgowns folded on their beds, each with a bar of lavender soap on top, a surprise from Leila. Maya’s nightgown was a brilliant crimson, her favorite color, with tiny crystal beading at the top, which she loved. Melanie’s was a pale lavender with pink ribbon and two tiny buttons. In the dim light, they undressed in front of the mirror. They had the same rosy breasts and flat stomachs. Melanie could see Maya watching her, her eyes fastening on Melanie’s bird tattoo. Melanie quickly pulled her nightgown over her head and her long hair caught in a button. Maya untangled it, telling Melanie she needed a haircut. Melanie’s need to feel close was so strong that she asked Maya to trim her hair, the greatest show of trust she could think of. “Just the ends, just half an inch,” Melanie said.
In nightgowns and bare feet, they marched outside to sit in the crisp grass under the lilac tree near Luke’s tombstone. The air was loose, the leaves unfurling white tongues into the foggy night.
Out there, with the scent of browning pie reminding her of old times and the cool wind on her neck, Melanie pushed through her apprehension and told Maya about her recent abstinence. She remembered going to see Maya at Cheever and befriending the orderly, Sebastian, who first slipped her some speed after she complained about how tired she was. Now that was all over. She would never again ask Sebastian to get her pills. She wanted to remember things clearly, she said. Everyone got to a point when it was important to remember the past.
Maya had become reticent. Tufts of blond hair fluttered through the darkness. Melanie wanted to stop her, but she couldn’t speak, her throat burning with fear. Fear of what. Triggering Maya’s catatonia. Or losing the connection she felt to her.
For the rest of her life, Melanie would remember the feeling of a trapped bird in her chest as she quietly watched most of her hair blowing easily across the yard, blond strands that caught in the grass near the gravestone, lighting up the night like golden thread.
A BREEZE RIDES THE prisms of light coming through the broken slats. Melanie’s breathing is faint; she is almost nonexistent.
There is water seeping under her cheek. She opens her mouth, letting the water wet her tongue. She will only drink enough to lessen the burn. Melanie has no pride. Pride is not even a question.
At once she feels her brother nearby. He is everywhere. In the light, in the stone floor. He could be perched on her shoulder, whispering in her ear. Melanie exists in a dreamlike state her mother used to call twilight, when the body is heavy and immovable and yet the mind is struck by golden lightning bolts of thought. Within this state, Melanie is flitting through the halls of memory, reliving the weeks after Luke was lost. She remembers how each night, either she or Maya woke up sobbing and ran into Leila’s room, where they would find her piled under blankets, her body curled into a fist, as though she could ward off the fact that her youngest child was lost—that he was somehow safely tucked against her breast, as though her body, with its sturdy roundness, was enough of a barrier to protect him.
As the months wore on, the girls stopped going to Leila. Instead, they whispered to each other across the moonlit nights. They wouldn’t say Luke’s name. They called him the baby. They told each other that the baby was under the bed, in the window, on the roof. That he was everywhere. They played games and said that the baby was playing, too. That he was just invisible. When late spring came, they even snuck out to look for diamonds in the Shongos’ cabin, just as they always had, with Old Sally leading the way. But they both knew they were looking for Luke. They both had been dreaming of him.
Nothing had been right since they lost him. They needed him. They needed him to bring everything back together the way it was when they were a family, their own family, somehow separate from their parents. They longed for the nights when they’d stay up late in their princess costumes, dancing in their bedroom in the milky light with Luke, their only audience. Only Luke could sing to the beetles that lived under the rocks, and only Luke could see what they saw, that the stars were very old angels, that the lilac trees were really other princesses waving in the window, and that the clouds were really children in disguise who had not yet been born but were watching to see who they liked, who was fun, and who they wanted their parents to be. They told Luke stories about children that turned to snowflakes in winter and fireflies in summer. Their little bird arms and legs would flap up and down as they giggled, jumping off their dressers onto their beds.
They had always been stronger together. Three children were a triangle, and Leila had always told them that a triangle was the strongest shape. They had grown close out of the necessity of protecting each other. There was that one cold fall morning when they had been forced to go on Victor’s fishing trip to Whiskey Point. They had begged Leila to not allow them to go, but she said that would make their father sad and so they agreed. They’d followed Victor through the reeds, with him carrying only a bottle of whiskey as the girls lugged the cooler and fishing poles. Luke trailed the group, clutching a can of worms. They quietly stayed far enough back from Victor so as not to smell the whiskey or hear his singing. But they didn’t see that Luke had been secretly dropping the worms, one by one, back to the earth. None of those worms deserved to die on a September morning, did they? Luke would later ask. Victor’s eyes blazed when they reached the point and he discove
red there were no worms left. He threatened to leave the children out there for eternity, to lock them all out of the house if they ever returned, unless they found each and every worm. But the sky was as cold as sheet metal, and although the children clawed the muddy bank for twenty minutes, they didn’t come up with a single worm. Maya and Luke complained that they couldn’t feel their fingers or their toes in their wet sneakers, and started to cry. Melanie marched up to Victor, who was sitting on the dock, finishing his drink. She demanded that he take them home. “Right now. Before the kids get sick,” Melanie said, her feet anchored apart, her old dingy gray parka pulling under her arms. Her legs trembled, but it was okay because all the strength in her body had risen right into her chest, making her voice feel like thunder.
Victor swung his legs off the dock, his whiskey breath flaring into the cold air. “The kids…Who in the hell do you think you are, you little shit?” He took a final swig and tossed the bottle into the lake.
“Run!” Melanie cried. And the children ran and ran through the muddy fields with Old Sally running alongside and Victor running after them, hardly able to keep up. By the time they reached the Shongos’ cabin, Victor had given up and was on his way to Kelley’s Bar.
When Victor returned home that night, he yelled so loud it made the windows shake. Luke and Maya hid in the corners, whimpering. Melanie refused to cry when Victor shouted at her, and this drove him crazy, so much that he sent her to bed without dinner. Later, Leila got soap in her eyes while she did the dishes and had to go out on the front porch with a box of Kleenex, where she stayed for two hours. When Victor fell asleep in front of the TV, Luke sneaked a half-eaten rhubarb pie upstairs that Leila had put out for Old Sally. He forgot to bring her a fork but Melanie said she didn’t care, that it would taste better with their hands. Maya had joined them, and as their hands and faces grew sweeter and stickier, they wholeheartedly agreed that pie tasted so much better this way. Everything was better when they were a triangle. Good things, not bad things, happened in threes. Leila said most people had it wrong.
WHEN LUKE’S BODY WAS finally found a year later, Melanie and Maya stopped reminiscing about the baby, and stopped playing make-believe. They still raced over the wet grass, their feet tracing old footsteps leading to the Shongos’ cabin. But things were different. They fought over everything. Suddenly, there was not enough of anything for them both. Certainly there was not enough of Leila. When they lost Luke, they lost each other. He was the separation, the space they needed. Without him, they collided.
Anxiously, they foraged through the coal bin and argued over a shiny piece of coal. Who saw it first? Who had gotten the last good one? They struggled. Someone hit someone else. No one knew who had started it, but by the end, they were both bruised and crying.
“Everyone knows it was your fault,” Maya said. “It was your idea to take the canoe into the lake, the whole thing was your—”
“You could have grabbed him when—”
“You stood up and made him fall.”
Melanie lost control and flung herself at Maya. Maya’s hands pulled at her hair, leaving tufts of blond curls scattered across the coal. They fought without sound. They fought harder than ever, and they didn’t know why. Perhaps because they loved each other and they didn’t know how anything would ever be the same again. If a ghost had tried to separate them, they wouldn’t have felt it. Potato bugs stopped moving grains of sand. Spiders stopped in midstream. The girls walked home an hour before sunrise, muscles sore, both crying silently, pockets stuffed with shiny pieces of coal.
After Maya fell asleep, Melanie snuck into the closet, her ritual. She removed the piece of floorboard from her secret hiding place. She removed the white cloth napkin with Leila’s initials on it, unfolding it over her knees, spilling the contents in front of her. There she’d sat, lap full of moonlight, holding a piece of coal, a gold button from Victor’s coat, three red beads, and a silver dollar. Here was all her luck. When she turned them over in her hands as the morning light snaked in, the items sparkled, tripling her luck, meaning she and Maya would be okay. When satisfied, she put everything away and got into bed, lying awake, watching the slats of light from the blinds that crawled across the ceiling each time a car passed. This was the beginning of the insomnia that would plague her for a lifetime. Night after night, she’d lie there replaying the events of Luke’s death in her mind or waiting for Victor to come home. What had happened to Luke after she had hit her head? Why couldn’t she remember? Had there really been a giant on the island? Hadn’t he seen her and waved, just for a second? Maya said she couldn’t remember seeing anyone. Now all Melanie could do was pray for them all. If she could hold her breath before the light receded, Victor would be okay. If she did this until she heard his car pull into the driveway, followed by the rattle of his key in the lock and his heavy legs pulling his body up the stairs, her parents would be okay. If he got in safely, if she didn’t have to look for him and rub a wet towel around his face to clean him up for Leila, if a radio flicked on and she heard his muffled sobs of apology, it was only then that she could sleep through the night.
Years later, when Melanie was fifteen, she would sneak into the basement of the Shongos’ boarded-up cabin. She was almost a woman now, and sad, like her mother. Unlike her mother, though, whose sadness weakened her, Melanie’s sadness made her willful, so full of anger that she could barely contain it. It was as though a switch had been turned on. One day, she dyed all her clothing black in the bathtub, cutting off her shirt sleeves and safety-pinning them back on. Everywhere she went she saw shadows hovering in the branches of trees. She was always cold. She never slept. She spent months wanting nothing, even after she got herself a boyfriend and started having sex. Then she wanted him, and she thought that was enough. And then she discovered pills, and she wanted them more than anything. Soon, her life became all about finding a quiet dark place to take them. The Shongos’ basement was the perfect place, for she could feel Luke’s presence there, and he seemed to be waiting for her. She was dreaming of him again, and this provided some comfort, despite the grief. The tombstone might be in her own backyard, but her little brother was here in the cabin—at least his spirit was. Time and time again, she would peer around corners, as though she might discover him hiding. She would say Luke’s name out loud, trying to scare herself. Sometimes she would feel the cool breeze of a draft on her neck and suddenly turn around. “Luke? Luke?” she would whisper. She knew it was bad luck to say a dead person’s name out loud. The spirit might get confused, might try to come back, and not be able to find his way home.
MELANIE WHISPERS LUKE’S NAME in her mind. She can hear his voice, see his face talking to her, begging her to chase him, again and again through the underwater grasses, amidst the piles of white stones and the layers of green lake glass. He is darting in and out, trying to lead her away, farther and farther away from the place where she is now.
Suddenly, she hears floorboards creaking and footsteps coming toward her. The stench of whiskey is familiar. She tries to scream but can’t. Someone is removing the blindfold. Panic races through her body. She sucks in her breath when she sees his face.
Her father, Victor.
The blue bloodshot eyes are burrowing into her, pleading, filling her with that old sense of panic mixed with guilt. He has the same pale stringy hair, the dark beard, now graying, and yellowed teeth. He sets down a box of children’s cereal beside a canteen. He leans over her, talking in a low voice, cradling her face in his hands. You have to eat, Melanie. You need your strength. Help me now the way you did before. I have waited all this time. Tell me the truth about your brother.
PART III
14
VICTOR ELLIS HAD ALWAYS been suspicious of moving water. The energy and force of the currents in rivers and streams, especially the ripples that drift across Canandaigua Lake, make him feel weak. He had left the place eleven years ago, even before his divorce was final. It was a reminder of the old life that he had
massacred. He’d started drinking soon after they had moved there. He’d only gone there for her, for Leila. But he had always hated the lake. The winding roads that led nowhere; the black gluey mud that always covered his truck; the plethora of insects—mosquitoes, dragonflies, and mayflies—that fed on and around the lake’s putrid vegetation; the deceptively unpredictable weather—the way storm clouds could appear quite suddenly in a clear blue sky, finding him in the middle of a field, unprepared, without rain gear; the smell of lilacs so thick in the air it still makes him gasp.
Now, during this last week in May as he sits in his house outside of Spencerport, forty miles away, the scent of lilacs suddenly corners him in the kitchen and he remembers. Each time he is reminded of anything about his old life, he picks up his gun, buys a bottle of Jack Daniels, walks out to the middle of the woods near his house, and shoots a pheasant. Only to maim, not to kill. Victor does not hunt for death. He shoots only to injure, to feel life regenerate. It is an act of creation to shoot the animal and force it to heal. Causing this explosion of life fills him with power and energy. He is compelled to do this whenever the scent of lilacs overwhelms him. It is almost instinct, the way he grabs for his gun, and in the two hundred milliseconds before Victor pulls the trigger, he reminds himself that he is the king of free will.
He knows he is to blame for the death of the little boy. He’d planned on moving to Mexico after it all blew over, but he’d only gotten as far as Spencerport, just under an hour’s drive northwest. On many occasions, he had tried to get farther away. But he was always trapped by the sweet smell of lilacs, which made him run for his whiskey, eventually becoming so sick he’d have to lie down with a blinding migraine. More than once, while packing his truck, his pit bull had broken free from her chain and Victor had had to go chasing her down for hours. In the last year it had gotten worse—his drinking problem had escalated and now he was chained to the courts. He had just gotten his third DWI in six years. The second DWI, a felony, had landed him in prison for a short time and then probation. The third, which he had just gotten two days ago, meant he had two motions against him: a violation of probation and a felony DWI. Bail had been posted and a court date had been set, but Victor knew this would be his end. The judge would surely sentence him to more prison time. He knew a bench warrant would be issued for his arrest if he missed his upcoming court date or was caught driving without a license. But the prospect of another stint in prison was a death sentence. He wouldn’t survive it. He had nothing more to lose by leaving town.