by Samuel Ligon
Then Kyle appeared, bringing our fighting and jealousy out of remission. We started arguing, like we’d argued through multiple break ups in college, the silences between our arguments growing and taking on weight. She talked about babies more as we drifted apart, an obsession I didn’t understand. Why would we have children now, when we seemed more unstable every day? And if it wasn’t babies, it was Kyle she talked about, until I couldn’t stand to hear any of it.
“What do you think of the name Isabelle?” she asked one night. “For a little girl?”
I didn’t think anything of the name Isabelle—because we weren’t going to have a little girl. Not then. Not ever. We were about done it felt like.
“Kyle wants me to pose for him,” she said, and I said, “Pose,” and she said, “Nude,” and I didn’t say anything.
“Are you moving to Long Island to get away from the city,” she said, “or to get away from me?”
“My aunt’s house is empty,” I said. “And Garden City’s not far.”
“You’re the only person I know,” she said, “who would move to the suburbs not to have children.”
But there were good times too—plenty of them—although, toward the end, if we weren’t fighting, everything felt fragile between us, like we were just waiting for the glue to take hold and wondering if it ever would.
I smoked another Nat Sherman at my aunt’s kitchen table. Cynthia was going to walk through the door any second and we’d argue about Kyle’s pants. We needed a catalyst, a last argument to determine if we were going to break up for good or start finding a way back to each other. It was just a matter of smoking and waiting. I hadn’t seen her in weeks, since before her family reunion up at Lake George. This night was no different than any other night she’d been gone. Unless I chose to believe she was gone for good. It was hotter than hell in my aunt’s kitchen. I lit another cigarette and waited.
7
Cynthia
Wanting her became a kind of sickness, as if I’d been infected with longing for this nameless, faceless entity who would grow in me and make herself known to me and, after she came out of me, keep growing into who she would become. I guarded against my selfishness, this wanting I felt to bring her to life, so deep in me it overwhelmed my fear of the cliché I seemed to be embracing, biological clock or whatever it was. None of that mattered. Months before I was pregnant, she existed in me, of me and separate from me too, teaching me how to transcend the enormous selfishness of this world, and then I wasn’t even aware of selfishness or my want, because I’d already transcended that and was living only for her. I was far past wondering if she’d fill some hole in my life. She’d already filled it, or if there wasn’t a hole, she’d already made my life so much larger—finally giving me this profound reason to live. I’d known love as a child and a sister, a lover and a friend. But this was different, deeper, so deep I could hardly believe Mark couldn’t feel her everywhere around us. She was there, somewhere, I don’t know how many months before I was pregnant, waiting for me, her demands on my attention the beginning of this enormous gift. All I wanted to do was find her.
Nikki
The minute Alina sees me at LaGuardia she bursts into tears. I take her in my arms and hold her, trying to ignore the men in business suits checking us out as she cries into my shoulder. At thirteen, Alina could pass for seventeen and we could be sisters, but that thought reminds me of my mother’s awful vanity and what the first mastectomy did to her, how it made her hate herself, as though her body—her beauty—was all she’d ever had. For the first time in days, I wonder when I’ll get the cancer that killed her, when Alina will, and then I forget all that and the men gliding by and everything else as I breathe her in, rubbing my hands over her head, through her hair, over the soft skin at the base of her neck, my beautiful, beautiful baby.
Mark
Cynthia’s parents were at the funeral home when I arrived, waiting in a room with velvety gold wallpaper and overstuffed chairs. I wasn’t prepared for how much they’d aged in the hours since I’d left the hospital. They looked like they’d been awake for weeks, starving. “We’re glad you’re here,” Denys said. “We know you want to be alone with her.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to be alone with her, but a man with a silver pompadour escorted me to a reception room where Cynthia’s casket sat on a stand surrounded by blown up photographs—Cynthia eating birthday cake, Cynthia on a horse, Cynthia and me on her parents’ patio. Seeing her up there everywhere made her seem both closer and further away, all those images evoking her, but also emphasizing her absence.
I wondered if Pompadour had seen her naked, if he’d handled her body. Of course he had. So what? From the back of the room I looked at her casket, only the top section of which was open. I walked toward her, thinking I wouldn’t recognize her, but I did, and she looked . . . not good, but not as bad as I’d expected, either. Her face seemed deflated and inflated, as though bones had broken before everything collapsed and swelled, shades of purple and yellow rising through her makeup. I petted her hair. Pompadour had probably washed it for her. I didn’t want to keep studying her for signs of damage.
I remembered going to the Cape spring break freshman year with a group of friends we later used as weapons—my roommate Phil, a girl named Sarah, Ben and Julie. It was Sarah’s parents’ summer place, and Cynthia and I were given the master bedroom. Not everyone at Brown came from money, but everyone I knew did. They weren’t snotty, though, not even Cynthia, whose father’s annual bonuses from Goldman Sachs were more than my father would earn in his life. Ben and Julie hooked up that trip. Phil and Sarah got married later. After five months together, Cynthia and I still could not stop touching each other. The six of us stayed up late, talking and drinking, and then Cynthia and I walked the beach for hours. We didn’t need to tell each other anything then. We knew everything we needed to know and what everyone else knew, the reason we were given the master bedroom. And it seemed that now that we’d arrived at this place of fullness or perfection—love or whatever it was—we would always inhabit it, would never change or age or grow dull to each other. It was just that we were young and in love for the first time. And time itself was different then. So much more was always happening.
Standing over her body, I could hardly put the chronology together, could hardly believe we’d start our cycle of cheating and clinging only five or six months after that morning on the beach. But that was long before any hint of erosion. When we finally returned to the sleeping house, we made a big breakfast for everyone, but no one woke, even with all our banging around the kitchen. I built up the fire and we ate alone, perfectly happy, then fell into bed, perfectly happy, and woke, perfectly happy. We stayed perfectly happy, too, for a while, and even rediscovered our happiness after we lost it. Then it got away from us again, and now we’d never get it back. I looked at the bruised and lacerated skin of her face. It seemed impossible that she wasn’t waiting for me back at her apartment or somewhere else. Anywhere else.
“You know I found those pants,” I finally whispered. “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, I know.” I leaned my forehead against her casket. “I often leave my pants in women’s apartments.”
I lifted my head and touched her broken nose, her lips. They were unyielding. There seemed to be some frost on them, some freezer burn. I kept petting her and feeling how far away she was, feeling as alone as I’d ever felt.
I kissed her forehead and walked back to the room with gold wallpaper, where Diana stood and pulled me into another embrace. “I want to spend a minute with her,” she said, “before we go to the luncheon.”
I’d forgotten about the luncheon, forgotten that people would be there—friends, family, I didn’t know who. Cynthia wouldn’t be there, of course. She’d be here, surrounded by pictures of herself. I’d be at a luncheon, with everyone who’d lost her, with everyone but her.
8
Burke
/> I didn’t quit Denny’s right away, even though our mother left me almost twenty grand. I took some time off when she died, a few days here, a few days there, and all I could think about was Nikki. I knew she was probably dead, but if she wasn’t, she was sure to know what happened to Cash. I was spending so much time with her pictures, it seemed like I already half knew her anyway, and if she was still alive, I thought she might be worth getting to know a whole lot better. I wanted to devote myself full time to finding her, but Billy shook his head when I told him I needed a leave. “Can’t get by without you now, Burke,” he said. “Not with Marlene on maternity and Sully back in the can.”
Billy was a good man, had hired me not three weeks out of Huntsville as a dishwasher, and then promoted me to line cook. I could feel the heat build in his office back behind the walk-in. I never would’ve laid a hand on him in anger. I swallowed hard and walked away. That’s what ate at me the next couple days—how I was trapped by the man’s goodness. Most ex cons don’t get one decent shot, and here I was considering walking from mine. It started to eat at me how desperate I was to hold onto my shitty job, half convincing myself I was lucky to be working at that fucking Denny’s while my brother’s killers roamed free. And with Connie gone, with Cash gone, with our mother gone, what did I have to be so good for?
I fell off the wagon, studying Nikki’s pictures with a bottle out in the Goat, feeling her alive in the night, but knowing in the morning they killed her, too. I was tired of answering to Billy and my probation officer. No one had done a damn thing about my brother’s murder. I drove to Austin again, but there was nothing left to discover. I didn’t know where else to search, until I learned about the internet from a waitress at work. I tracked Nikki to a newspaper in New York, the guiding hand of fate delivering her to me just like that, delivering us to each other. I was so overcome with emotion, learning she was alive, I could hardly contain myself, like getting someone the best present you could imagine getting them and then having to wait to watch them open it.
She was all business when she picked up the phone, until I said my name, and then there was a heavy silence before I felt the air go out of her. “Burke Chandler?” she finally said, and it was like a damn breaking inside me at the sound of her voice, my blood rushing so hard and fast as I told her how I’d been looking for her and how happy I was she was alive, feeling it right there on the surface of my skin, in my throat.
“I was sure they killed you, too,” I told her. “Just sure of it.”
“No,” she said. “I’m—no.”
I listened to her breathing, so happy, and she said, “Burke?” and I said, “Yeah,” and she said, “Burke Chandler?” and I said, “Cash’s brother, Burke—I’m right here.”
“Cash’s brother,” she said, shocked, just like I’d been shocked at discovering her alive, and so grateful.
“I was thinking they done something to you like they done to him,” I told her. “I made up these awful stories in my mind about it—you and Cash and what they done to him. And what I thought they done to you. Making you turn on him.”
“I was gone then,” she said. “When he—when they.”
“I thought maybe you’d know something,” I said. “Who or why or whatnot.”
“I was in Chicago then,” she said. “My aunt’s place in Oak Bluff.”
“Oak Bluff, huh?” and she said, “I didn’t know what happened back in Texas.”
She sounded just like she looked, even though she wasn’t southern and I thought she would be. But she sounded just like she looked. Beautiful. I told her I could sit on the phone and listen to the sweet sound of her voice all day long.
She didn’t say anything for a long minute, but I could hear her breathing.
I wondered if she was about to cry, thinking about Cash, bringing up all her old feelings. She didn’t really know me yet, so it wouldn’t be me she’d cry over. Not yet. “You okay?” I asked her.
“Where are you?” she said.
“The house we grew up in,” I said. “He must have told you about me,” and she said, “Yes,” and I said, “I just want to hear the sound of your voice. Like honey.”
“I’m not—I don’t know what to say.”
“Tell me about you and him,” I said. “All y’alls time together. I’m just so glad you’re alive. I worked myself into a state nearly.”
“This is just such a surprise,” she said, her voice trembly and scratchy under all that honey.
“Did he bring you home to Waco?” I asked.
“Un-unh.”
“So you never met our mom? She passed, by the way. Last month.”
“I’m sorry,” Nikki said. “I never did get to meet her.”
“But he must’ve told you about me,” I said. “We was close as could be. My time at Huntsville was done for him. Did he tell you that?”
“Yes,” she said, and I said, “What’d he say, exactly?” and when she didn’t answer, I said, “You probably want to tell me face to face, is that it?”
That’s when she finally let go, crying.
“It’s all right,” I told her. “I’m here now. You can let it all out.”
That was probably the peak, when I was still too stupid to see what was right in front of me, right when I could feel us coming together, like I always knew we would.
“There’s just so much we need to say to one another,” I said when she was about done crying. “And I bet you’re even prettier now than you was back then.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t. . . ,” she said, sniffling, and I said, “I would,” and waited for her to laugh, this long pause hanging heavy in the air between us.
Looking back, that’s when something started feeling just a tiny bit off.
Nikki
When I finally got off the phone, I had to leave work and settle myself out on the boardwalk, walking, wanting to throw up every time I looked right at it, so not looking right at it, and nowhere to go, just walking, moving. Alina was probably home, packing for school, and Kyle was probably in his studio, preparing paintings for his upcoming show. I just wanted to go, to run. But where? I wasn’t a kid like when I ran from Austin, from Providence, from Manchester. And I wasn’t going to run from Kyle.
There was a guy I met when I was pregnant in Portland, Bobby, who I became close to before and after Alina was born, who loved me and loved Alina until she was almost two. He was thirty years older than me. That’s when I realized how fucked up I was. Not the rape. It wasn’t that. I wasn’t even calling it that then. But just everything. My mother and how I’d run from her. Cash dead and Alina. My cousin Melanie in love with Daryl down in Austin, and how much I’d wanted him, how wrong that was, and how I wanted to be better than I was. Just all of it. And this guy, Bobby, in Portland, he loved me, I knew that. He loved Alina. And he was a good man—I liked him—but he wanted to be more than friends, which was perfectly natural, even though I didn’t feel that way. And even though I didn’t feel that way, I wanted to feel that way and made the mistake of trying. We slept together a couple times—twice—how I realized my feelings were never going to develop. I wanted them to, but there was nothing there. We lived together awhile as roommates, until I understood it was a kind of torture for him, that as long as I was around he’d hold out hope that we’d wind up together. I knew I was holding him back, that my presence in the house was hurting him. I’d never be able to give him what he deserved. I knew how much he wanted me to love him and I tried. But I couldn’t do it, and he’d never find someone if I was around.
I was taking classes at Portland State and he’d take care of Alina while I was at school. I came home one night and he was in the kitchen just beaming, because Alina had called him Daddy, and even though I knew it was the best possible thing for Alina to stay there with him, because he’d love her and take care of her, and love me and take care of me, something snapped in me. I knew that
minute I couldn’t stay. I wasn’t going to be taken care of. I didn’t love him like that, and if I stayed one second longer I was never going to leave and we’d end up getting married and raising Alina and I would shrink a little every year and lose pieces of myself until there’d be nothing left. But wasn’t that what happened to everyone? I was too young to know. I only knew I wasn’t going to have that life. I ran to Seattle and didn’t look back. I was twenty years old and too wild and stupid to know better.
But now I wasn’t so young. I wasn’t so fucked up. And I wasn’t going to be so fucked up. I just had to satisfy whatever Burke wanted and get rid of him. Mostly, I had to make sure he never found out about Alina.
Before he called again, I tried to prepare myself, to anticipate him.
“I just can’t stop thinking about you,” he said when I picked up the phone a few days later, and I realized I hadn’t prepared anything at all.
“You don’t know how hard it is to heal in prison,” he said.
I’d noticed in his first call how often he mentioned prison.
“All I can think about is that night,” he said, “how they could have hurt you and how you might know something you don’t know you know. You learn just about all there is to learn doing time, including the fact that sometimes you know things you don’t know you know. That’s the guiding hand of fate, protecting you or steering you towards knowledge, the reason I keep wondering about that night and people that might have been around and such before he was killed.”