by Gin Phillips
The body seemed good enough. The face she was a bit more intrigued with. It was still her face, but it had moved on without her permission. She was not beautiful, and there was no one feature that seemed remarkable, but taken as a whole, her face had become striking. She looked slightly feline and exotic and—she narrowed her eyes—grown. She had turned pretty.
The boys didn’t notice that she’d missed things; they noticed she’d turned pretty. Andy Layton kissed her the night of the dance, and she let him, though she didn’t let him do more than that. She did not enjoy being intimate with his intimidating teeth. A few months later, she let Sam Norman kiss her more thoroughly, and she enjoyed it immensely, although she never lost her fear of where his hands were traveling. Neither boy commented on any lack of expertise. She was more afraid of being found out as a fraud, as a freak, than she was afraid of the kissing and the handling and the quest for zippers and buttons. But she monitored their hands and stopped their quests that year. She was still learning, still trying to find her spot in this new time with this new face. And those boys didn’t spark anything in her.
She went to slumber parties. She tried beer and learned to like wine coolers. She snuck out to meet boys and sat in dark cars. She never got drunk, and she never fell in love. But she learned to fake it. No one ever knew she’d missed things.
Staring at herself now in the mirror, she thought she looked a little too alert. As if she’d had too much coffee. She took several deep breaths and stepped into the tub and paused, one foot and ankle stunned by the heat. It occurred to her that the blood of the caterpillar she’d found—with Scott looking over her shoulder—could not have been bright green. It must have been red. Maybe the caterpillar itself was bright green.
She lowered herself into the water, and the heat blanched the memory completely. Soon she sat with her eyes closed, head tilted back against the tile wall. She had one arm under the water, the other hanging over the edge of the tub. She thought only of the contrast between the almost scalding water—she had a waterline of pink meeting white across her belly—and the chill of the porcelain tub. The porcelain was ice against her neck, but she could feel beads of perspiration on her lip. She skimmed her hand over the water, nothing but fingertips submerged, marveling at the pull of the water, the urge to immerse her hand.
She focused on her fingertips. She thought about the caterpillar and tried to sharpen her memory. The right answer was in there. The past was solid, weighable as cement. You could pull it out if you wanted to, but it was done and over, and could be wrapped up and stored without fear of it ever changing.
She heard Silas come in through the front door and called to him from the bathroom. She sank lower into the water and waved one dripping foot at him.
He smiled as he slipped through the door, eyes settling on what the water concealed. “Need company?”
“Not this time,” she said. “I’m stewing myself. Five more minutes.”
He swayed toward the tub, but he turned and left without more than a friendly leer. She could hear him clanging in the kitchen.
She took longer than five minutes. He walked in again and said that if she was getting clean, he probably should, too. He pulled his gray T-shirt over his head, his back to her. He faced the mirror over the sink and rubbed his face. He’d kept the beard and mustache he’d accumulated over months at the canyon, although he’d mentioned shaving them. The hair was dense and starting to curl and not at all unpleasant against her skin.
“Hand me the shampoo?” he asked.
“Shampoo?” she repeated. But she handed him the bottle.
He cupped his hands and brought the water to his face, rubbing palms and fingertips in circles over his forehead and cheeks and chin. He reached for the shampoo, and Ren sat up, propping her elbows on the tub.
He poured a small dollop into his hand, then began working it from his sideburns down the line of his jaw.
“You use shampoo on your beard?” she asked.
He turned to her, foam-faced. “Heck, yeah. It’s hair.”
“And your mustache.”
He shook his head once, not enough to disrupt the lather. “I don’t think of this as a mustache.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s an element of my beard. It’s part of a broader expanse.”
“Huh.”
After he had scrubbed to his satisfaction, she told him to give her another five minutes. He closed the door behind him. She dragged both hands slowly through the water again, letting them float on top of the heat. She dipped herself low enough that the ends of her hair, hanging loose from a plastic clip, were dark and drenched. She did not linger longer. She slipped on the T-shirt he had left discarded on the bathroom floor. When she found him, he was sitting on his side of the bed, reading glasses on, flipping through a stack of loose-leaf pages.
He looked over the edge of his glasses as he put down the paper. She came to him, still tinged pink, and took off his glasses. When she touched him, the heat of her skin rubbed off onto his.
Later they brought in grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup and ate carefully on her white sheets. She liked lying with him in her own bed. Other parts of the house felt crowded from his clothes and books and stacks of things, but the bed felt warm and cozy. He found a basketball game, then two basketball games, and he flipped back and forth between them. She moved her dishes to the ground and turned so she lay on her side with her feet by his head. She was digging through the bedspread and sheets, pulling them from their moorings, trying to get to his feet.
“I like your feet,” she said.
“I know. You ever go to a Pacers game? You must have grown up liking the Pacers.”
She’d won her battle against the sheets. His toes flexed in the air, and she traced one finger down his arch. He jumped.
“You should watch the Suns with me,” he said. “You’d like the Suns.”
She pressed just under the ball of his foot, hard enough to feel the muscle yield. He made a pleased sound.
“I’ve always liked Nash,” she said.
“We had a hoop off the side of Dad’s tool shed and a dirt court. Dad used to shoot with me back before my brother, Alex, was old enough to play. Or not really shoot. Dad never cared for playing basketball, but he’d stand under the net and toss the ball back to me. He’d do it for an hour sometimes—back when I was nine or ten, I didn’t exactly make many shots. But he’d just feed me the ball, over and over and over, and congratulate me when I made one.”
“That’s a very patient dad,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes. The last time I remember him spanking me was when I was eight years old and he asked me to put the ball up in the shed. But I didn’t. I didn’t feel like it. I took it into the house and bounced it around—moron that I was—and launched it right into a porcelain lamp. Dad took me to my room and beat my butt until there were welts. It took three days for the marks to go away. Of course, he felt worse than I did. He said losing your temper was a weakness, and he had no patience for weakness. He never spanked me again.”
She sat up, one hand still resting on the top of his foot. “That’s harsh.”
“Nah,” he said. “He hated that loss of control—that’s why he never did it again.”
“You’re not at all mad about it? Even now?”
“No,” he said, and the tone of his voice made her think he didn’t really understand the question. She must have looked skeptical.
“Dad’s parenting was sort of like raising puppies,” he said. “Show them who’s the alpha dog. And don’t overpraise them. He pushed us hard, and it made us better.”
“I’m not sure I think it’s possible to overpraise an eight-year-old.”
“You know,” said Silas, blinking down at her, “in biblical times, if a woman uncovered a man’s feet
and lay down by them, it meant that she was offering herself to him. It’s how Ruth gets Boaz to marry her. Although there’s also some thought that uncovering feet was only a euphemism. Maybe she wasn’t anywhere near his feet.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You’re a biblical scholar?”
“My dad sort of was.”
“I thought your dad owned a ranch.”
“That, too. He has many sides.” He wiggled his toes. “Come up here, Aurenthia. Ven aquí. Come lie next to me.”
Even shortened, her name was barely palatable. Renny-ren-ren, Renny-Penny, Renny-Skinny, Scott would call her. Nonsense words that for some reason used to embarrass and infuriate her—she thought she remembered biting his arm once in blind rage. Scott could make her cry just by saying her name over and over until it became meaningless.
When Silas said her given name, she wanted him to repeat it. Aurenthia. He said it with the same easy lilt she admired in his bursts of Spanish, syllables rising and falling and blurring at the edges. Her name was a new word altogether.
She felt his stubble against her forehead, occasionally swapped for the softness of lips. He spoke against her eyebrow.
“I wonder how long before you’ll be completely bald,” he said. He wrapped his hand in her hair, twisting, using the rope of it to pull her head back gently. He studied her exposed face.
“I’m not going to go bald.”
“No?”
“No. No women in my family have gone bald as of yet.”
“Good. I’m not going to go bald, either.”
“I got that feeling.” She threaded her fingers through the thick, dark hair at the nape of his neck, then skimmed her hand over the shape of his skull.
“I’d still love you if you were bald,” he said, “but it would be an adjustment.”
“Did something happen with your family?” he asked, her cheek on his chest, his hand in her hair. His voice was soft and careful. “You’ve clearly declared them to be off-limits for conversation, and I can’t help wonder why.”
Her fingers ran up and down his arm lightly, distractingly. “They’re not off-limits,” she said. “Almost all my family still lives in Indiana. Nothing exciting.”
“Your mom and dad still together?”
The rhythm of her fingers stopped, then started again. “Dad died of a heart attack when I was in college.”
“I’m sorry.”
She nodded once.
“Any siblings?” he asked.
“No.”
The girl, Lynay, had followed Ren back to her house. This had certainly never happened before. Only Scott had appeared to her when she was at home, alert, and looking straight at him. He was familiar and comforting. She did not know what this girl was, exactly.
As invasions go, it was a quiet one. Lynay showed no inclination toward conversation. She seemed to want only a solitary place to do her work. It was like having a mouse in the house—there was nothing inherently frightening about the girl other than the suddenness of her appearances. If she would announce herself before she entered a room, Ren thought, they could have coexisted pleasantly. Because at first Ren was mostly curious, intrigued by the girl following her home like a lost puppy. She was somewhat flattered. She felt a kind of protectiveness for her young artist. She thought that the girl’s presence promised something—maybe an intimacy, a confidence.
There was no sign of the parrot woman. Her presence would have felt like a very different kind of invasion. Because the words were still there, hanging in the air without any explanation. If ghosts intended to make announcements, Ren thought they should at least be more specific about them. But the girl might know what the words meant. She might be able to decipher them.
On her fourth day home, the morning after she’d taken her bath, Ren turned the corner into the kitchen and saw the girl sitting cross-legged on the floor by the kitchen table. She was rhythmically scraping the outside of the bowl with a chunk of sandstone. Ren had watched other women—living women—do this occasionally. The junctures between the coils were weak, always the most fragile part of the structure. So the inside of the bowl had to be scraped for practicality’s sake, and often both sides were scraped for art’s sake. The bowl in Lynay’s lap had already been scraped smooth on the inside.
She had thin hands with long fingers, and she worked steadily, soothingly, as if she were rubbing skin and muscle rather than clay. Some of the scabs on her knuckles had peeled away and oozed thin blood. Clay was soft as it was molded, but once it hardened, it was not kind.
“Nice of you to visit,” said Ren, forgetting the growling in her stomach.
The girl was back to pretending that she was unaware of Ren’s presence. Her hair was pulled into an intricate knot, whorls twisting around her ears and neck with no visible means of support. Her hair did not move. Her breasts were bare, obscured by her arms. Her legs were folded under her, but she had leggings on, dark webs of crisscrossed strips of cloth. Her head was at an angle, with the curve of her neck and the strong line of her jaw and chin exposed. There was no softness to her face, just smooth skin stretched over perfect bone, large eyes intent, and she was lovely in a way that left Ren unsettled. She was glad that Silas was in the shower. But maybe that was no coincidence—maybe the girl did not care to appear in front of Silas.
Ren took a step closer. “I think you have to admit you can see me, since you’re sitting in my kitchen.”
Lynay kept working her clay. In more scientific terms, silica and aluminum. Ren loved to watch it under a microscope, where the molecules ricocheted and slid, spastic and frantic. Disconnected but trapped.
“What did she mean?” she asked the girl.
No answer.
Ren frowned. “The parrot woman. Non. She said I would lose him.”
The girl ran the tip of one finger down the curve of the bowl, testing for unevenness.
“Silas?” pushed Ren. “She meant something will happen to Silas?”
Ren’s cell phone rang, and the girl was gone. Ren cursed at herself for asking the question—asking the question acknowledged that she somehow believed the parrot woman. Which she did not.
She did not. She worried about leaving Silas alone in the house all day, worried about occasional catches in his breathing at night, worried when he winced as he stood up, worried about him walking to the bookstore, for God’s sake. But she would not explore her reasons for worrying. She rolled her head from shoulder to shoulder, considered the empty tile floor, and turned back toward the smell of coffee.
The next day, Lynay appeared on the brick hearth of the fireplace, where seconds before there had been only air. Her hands were gray and wet. She was shaping a jar. The clay had smeared not only on Lynay’s hands but all the way along her arms, up to the elbows. She looked like she was turning to stone.
Ren sighed and stood. She walked to the fireplace and sat at Lynay’s feet on the braided wool rug. It was rough against the soles of her feet, but she felt guilty sitting on a soft sofa while the dead girl sat on hard brick.
“So don’t you do anything other than make pottery?” asked Ren. She was more prepared to make conversation than she had been the day before—she had used the past twenty-four hours to consider her options. What she needed, she had decided, was the right kind of small talk. The kind that was appropriate for dead prehistoric artists. (No weather, no sports. Movies and television were out.) She needed something light, something nonthreatening that wouldn’t frighten Lynay away. She would work up to the more important questions slowly.
It also had occurred to her that she should not waste the chance to answer questions she’d wondered about for years. So she chose a practical line of questioning. She smiled at the girl and kept her tone friendly.
“Do you take care of kids and cook and clean and all that business?” she said. “I mean, did you?
I notice I don’t see you making stew or tanning a hide or carrying water. I don’t see any reason you couldn’t be tanning a hide in my living room. It’s just as easy as molding the clay. You know, or you could be cooking. Do you cook?”
She stopped, aware that she was babbling.
The girl’s dark eyes flickered to Ren’s face so briefly that Ren wasn’t sure she had seen them move. She felt a shiver along the tops of her arms, a physical thrill at the possibility of response. Of two-way communication, however subtle. Then Lynay raised her eyes again, holding Ren’s gaze before looking down. Her hands slowed.
“Why do you make these bowls?” Ren asked softly. She felt a twinge of discomfort, a different kind of gooseflesh on her arms, and she knew what it was about the girl’s prettiness that felt wrong. There was pain etched into it, in the way she held her mouth and the dullness of her eyes and the small lines across her forehead. Suffering. The suffering intensified the allure of her face, making it sharper and deeper but also, Ren thought, making it into something that should not be observed.
“Why?” she asked again.
Lynay set the not-solid jar on the floor. One side of the jar crumpled, slack. She raised her wet hands to her face, and held up two fingers on each hand, a sign, in Ren’s mind, for either victory or peace. The fingers were slick and smooth, and the lamplight changed the tone of the clay slightly, making it less grayish and more honey.
Lynay dragged her fingers across her cheekbones, leaving clay marks from the bridge of her nose to her hairline. She lifted her fingers and pressed them under her ears, tracing the line of her jaw. She made a sharp finishing motion—a flick into the air—when the tips of her fingers came together at her chin. Her skin was smooth and dark and almost perfect other than a thin scar on her forehead. The lines of clay gave her face the shadowy variegation of a pelt, part raccoon or bobcat.
Lynay held her hands out to Ren, palms up. The clay on them was still smooth and shiny, and her hands were their own creations. The marks were beginning to dry on the girl’s face, seeping into it, forming small lines as it hardened.