by John Fulton
“Merry Christmas,” her father said.
“Merry Christmas,” Rachel heard herself say.
* * *
On New Year’s Day, the doorbell rang in the middle of the afternoon and Rachel knew it was them—the police had come to question her, the police, with Mr. Bobs or Father Kelsh or both. But when she looked through the peephole, she saw Rand, his smiling face warped and pulled into a cone by the glass. “You can’t be here,” she said through the door.
“Hi,” he said. “Happy New Year. Please open up.”
“No.”
“Please,” he said, and she finally did open the door.
“You have to go,” Rachel said. She felt the presence of her mother just down the hall, dying behind the half-open door of her bedroom. It was obscene. “I’m sorry.” He opened his mouth just as she closed the door and cut off the desperate sound of her name—“Rachel!” He knocked, then knocked again, and Rachel went around to the living room window and watched him, tall and skinny, stare at the front door and kick at the concrete with his tennis shoe a few times before he turned around and left.
The next day, the doorbell rang again. “I told you that you couldn’t come here.”
Rand began to speak rapidly in German, and the flow of that strange language on the long, sorrowful thread of Rand’s voice kept her from closing the door. “I am sorry,” he finally said in English.
“You can’t come in,” Rachel said. “But maybe I can come out.” Rachel hadn’t left the house for days, and she squinted in the bright light. The desert air seemed cold and raw. She had to hug her arms to keep warm, and the crumbly sidewalk stung her bare feet.
“You maybe want to put shoes on,” Rand said.
“No. No I don’t.” She felt the sharp edge of everything then, and she liked it. Even the grass on the front lawn of the nearby church—the only grass in Rachel’s neighborhood—felt individual and prickly when she sat down and leaned against her palms. Some cats came to bother them, slinking against their legs, and Rachel pushed them away.
“There is something mean about you,” Rand said.
“Yep,” Rachel said. “I know. So why did you come back to see me?”
Rand smiled, showing his teeth. He wore a T-shirt that said READ BOOKS in large red letters, and Rachel thought she loved him then, his intelligence, his knowledge of the world, his taste for octopus, that ugly sea creature, the large, generous smile he directed at her now, despite the fact that she was mean. “I am missing you,” he said. “I am missing our English lessons. Lisa on the North Pole is asking about you. I am wondering about your pictures, your dark photographs. I miss them, too.” They were silent for a while and lay on their backs and looked into the cloudless, cold sky. “My family and I are going away at the end of the summer,” Rand said. “To Rio.”
“I thought so,” Rachel said, still looking into the simple blue sky that seemed to obliterate the drama of facing the funny, dangly-limbed, foreign boy whom she liked too much to ever let go. They were just voices speaking out of the air, and that made things easier to hear and say. “I need to tell you something,” she said. “But I can’t say it in my language. Would you teach me some words?”
“A German lesson?” he asked.
“Please.” She asked him the word for dying, the word for my, the word—the most difficult word—for mother. The German was strange and seemed to break apart in her mouth, and before she could finish constructing her crumbling sentence, Rand knew.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh.”
“Yep,” Rachel said.
“Can I help you?” Rand asked. He had sat up on the grass, and Rachel, who hadn’t moved, could make out from the side of her eyes his torso slanting hugely above her, taking up half the sky. She had to look away.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
* * *
When school started again in January, something seemed different, though Rachel could not guess what it was. The shabby brown halls lined with gray padlocked lockers seemed unchanged. The stink of shoe leather and pencil erasure was the same. Perhaps her classmates had grown taller and more greasy-faced; teenagers were always growing and sprouting pimples, and Rachel herself felt a new and painful constellation of zits coming in above her nose. And her bra had become snug; its little hook bit into her soft back, and somehow she would soon have to ask her grieving father to buy her the next size up. How would she even begin to mention her growing breasts to him?
She and Rand spent more and more time together, though they no longer kissed, really. They sometimes cuddled on Rand’s bed and gave each other brief squeezes and hugs. But they did not approach the terrors of first sex again. Rachel continued to enhance his vocabulary. And on Ash Wednesday, after the school Mass, Rand approached her, looking perplexed. He, like Rachel and all of the students at Our Lady, wore a cross of ashes—black charcoal—on his forehead, like a burn mark that signified a commitment to sacrifice and a Christ-like life. During the Mass, nuns and priests stationed at the end of each pew had dipped their fingers in a pot of black dust and marked the foreheads of students as they proceeded to the altar to receive Communion. It was silly, Rachel thought, all these teenagers pretending to be disciples of the Son of God. “What is the meaning of the word retribution?” he asked her.
This word felt like a slap in the face to Rachel. She thought she’d been listening closely to Father Kelsh’s reflection on the Gospel that afternoon, but she had not heard him say retribution and she could not fight off the feeling that Rand’s ignorance was now trying to teach her something. “It means that God is punishing,” she said. “It means ‘payback.’”
“God is cruel,” he said without much conviction.
“No,” Rachel said. “God is sleeping.”
Rachel would pass Mr. Bobs in the hallway now and then, but he would conspicuously—with a certain extravagance—pretend not to notice her, and this treatment made her feel smaller, diminished in the world. He wore a new whistle around his neck, as if she had never humiliated him and stolen from him.
Rachel’s duties as a photographer continued, though as January moved into February, she noticed that her work had settled into the sort of peaceful cliché that Mr. Marcosian had wanted. She showed the girl’s basketball team carrying Katie Lopez on their shoulders after their victory over Sonora High. She showed Marcus Ray goose-stepping and holding aloft the pigskin in the end zone after a touchdown. Then, during the football state championship game in February, Rat Swank failed to rise from a pileup and Rachel raced down to the sidelines, where she saw him, his fat linebacker’s gut spilling white and fleshy from his jersey and his face splattered with new, undried blood. She aimed her camera just as Mr. Bobs put his hand up in front of her lens and said, “For heaven’s sake, girl!” in a tone of utter disgust that left her stunned. She put the camera down and watched as Coach Bobs and two other coaches attended to the injured player. “How many fingers am I holding up, son?” Mr. Bobs was asking softly. He held the back of Rat’s bloody head in one hand and put out three fingers with the other. “How many?”
“It doesn’t hurt. Not at all,” Rat said. He had that look in his eyes that she had seen first in the driver’s ed movies, that look as if he saw beyond what Father Mannon, Rachel’s religion teacher that term, called “the veil,” and Rachel was afraid for him. Who knew what the poor, injured fat boy saw then. A bright light? A bottomless darkness? And what had he done to anybody? Just the week before, Rachel had written the worst homosexual message about him on the bathroom stall divider. “Billy Bat bones Rat Swank up his mousy butt.” All those b’s had been so compelling to pronounce that she’d read it out loud again and again to herself as she dried the stupid tears from her eyes.
Thank God he recovered from his minor concussion and could be seen three days later walking through the halls of Our Lady without so much as a bandage, looking as dull-eyed and physically massive as ever.
Then, in early March, on a Wednesday afternoon, the sleep
ing world began to wake and push back at Rachel. Just after she’d finished crying in the basement bathroom, someone walked in and stood in front of her stall. “Who’s in there?” this person asked. In the strange, cavernous acoustics of the bathroom, the voice speaking from the other side of the stall took on a God-like depth and solidity.
“No one,” Rachel said back. She had pulled her feet up onto the toilet seat and was hugging her knees, trembling and looking down between her feet at the pool of toilet water, where she saw the icy edges of her own reflection. “Go away,” she said, though she somehow dropped her black felt-tipped marker then and watched it hit the tiles and roll out beneath the stall door into plain sight. A fist hammered on the stall door. “Open up this minute!” She obeyed and found herself looking up at Sister Mariam Anne’s chalky old face framed in a baby blue habit. She held up the evidence of the black marker in a fist. “Evil girl,” the nun said, looking away from Rachel’s partial nakedness. “Fasten your pants, little lady. Fasten them this minute.”
Up the two flights of stairs on the way to Father Kelsh’s office, Sister Mariam Anne held Rachel at arm’s length, gripping her earlobe and twisting it until Rachel hunched over and felt that side of her head blaze with a pain that shivered into her right arm and made her eyes fill with tears. “Evil girl,” Sister Mariam Anne said again as she stood her before Father Kelsh, who sat calmly at his desk, as if he’d been waiting hours for this moment. Behind Father Kelsh stood a huge glass case filled with the gilded trophies of the school’s athletic state titles, trophies nearly as tall as Rachel herself. She cried out loud and choked a little on the strong aerosol odor of the old nun.
“What is the problem, Sister?” Father Kelsh asked.
“This little lady,” she said, “is our graffiti artist, Father.” She came down especially hard on the word artist, and Rachel understood now that she had been stalked, hunted, and captured. She was the graffiti artist. She was at the middle of a drama of justice and punishment.
“Oh,” he said. “You can sit down, Rachel.” His voice lacked severity, which seemed to disappoint Sister Mariam Anne.
“She’s the one,” the old lady said.
“Thank you, Sister.” His eyes told her to leave the room, and she did. “So,” Father Kelsh asked, “did you write the graffiti?”
“No,” Rachel said. But then she changed her mind. “Yes. I did it.”
“Thank you for the truth,” he said. Father Kelsh’s slightly chubby face remained calm. “You upset people, you know. You used real names, names of students and teachers at Our Lady. Can you tell me why?”
“I don’t think I can,” Rachel said.
Father Kelsh smoothed down his plump mustache, thought for a moment, and then seemed to accept Rachel’s silence. “You will stop now, won’t you?” She nodded her head. Then he said it outright, without any anger in his voice. “We will have to suspend you for a few days.” None of this was the way she’d imagined it over and over again when she’d seen Father Kelsh and Mr. Bobs waiting for her with the police at the front door. Where were the biblical curses, the black accusations, the fierce voices? In his Masses, Father Kelsh evidently spoke of retribution. But here, in his office, he was just a person who seemed a little shy and hesitant over the phone when he said to her father, “We need to ask you to come pick up Rachel.” In less than ten minutes, her father showed up in his work suit and the red unicycle tie, which Father Kelsh actually complimented in passing. “Thank you,” her father said. “It was a Christmas present from my wife.” And this small, strikingly false statement would be what Rachel would remember most about that day. What bullshit. What terrible bullshit. Her mother, her father’s wife, was a dying woman, a woman who could give them nothing now, not even a tacky, stupid necktie.
In the car, her father tried and failed to be a disciplinarian. “I’m not exactly sure what to do about this,” he said. “But I don’t think we should tell your mother.”
“Okay. Sure. Let’s not tell her.” Then she said, “You lied to Father Kelsh.”
“I did?”
“Mom didn’t give you that tie. You gave that tie to yourself.”
Her father glanced at her, then watched the road again. “There’s something a little nasty about you right now, a little hurtful.”
She seemed to be demanding this sincerity from people lately, first from Rand and now from her father. “I know it,” she said. Then she made what she hoped would be a confession. “I lie, too. I lie all the time.” To her surprise, her father let this go. He just drove on in silence and left Rachel alone with her secrets and her lies.
* * *
During the few days of her suspension, Rachel watched her father, who’d get off work at noon, then spend long hours gluing his wooden ship together on a card table in the basement. How did a ship get into a bottle? It was just as everyone suspected. The bottom of the bottle was the last piece to be glued on.
On the same card table, her father had set up a small white speaker, in which they could hear the sound—a little bit like a wind or the risings and swellings of the sea—of her mother breathing upstairs in her room. Rachel half-expected it to stop at any time—the sea, the wind of her mother’s life. But it didn’t. Not yet. From time to time, they’d hear her rouse, painfully swallow or even moan, then fall back into that constant rhythm.
One afternoon, Rachel went downstairs to an empty basement and looked at the stupid white speaker as she listened to the voices of her parents speaking to each other. “I worry about you and Rachel,” her mother said.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” her father said.
“I hate to picture it—you two alone in the evenings. The father and the daughter at the dinner table. The father and the daughter without the mother. It seems terribly lonely.”
“Not at all,” he said. “I mean, it will be lonely. But Rachel and I will manage.”
“How?” she asked. “What will you do?”
“Please,” he said. “I’d rather not talk about this. Not now.”
And because Rachel could no longer stand to hear about it, she walked out of the room.
* * *
“I learned about that part of history last year,” she told her father one afternoon in the basement as he delicately sheathed the small cloth sails to the booms of his model ship.
“What?” he said.
“Christopher Columbus. The Niña, the Santa María, and the Pinta,” Rachel said.
“Falling off the edge of the world.”
“Yeah,” Rachel said. “But the real problem for them was scurvy. When they ran out of citrus fruit. No vitamin C. People got sores and scabs. They lost their hair, their fingernails. Their flesh just sort of fell apart. They’d kill one another for a wedge of lemon to suck on. But all they had was salted meat, and that didn’t help.” She remembered now how much pleasure Mr. Marcosian, her history teacher last year, had taken in describing the sort of deterioration Columbus’s crew had suffered. As much as he disliked her photographs, Mr. Marcosian had an appetite for darkness, imagining the worst. Everybody did, it seemed.
“That’s not the sort of voyage I picture,” her father said. “Blue seas, winds that ripple the water, the smell of sea air, dolphins at the bow.”
“That’s not true,” she said. “It’s not like that.” She thought of the North Pole—no bears, no penguins, nothing but whiteness, empty whiteness.
“Maybe it’s a little bit like that.”
Rachel didn’t know. She had never seen the sea, save for on TV, where it was usually portrayed as a villain, harboring terrible man-eating sharks and spewing storms at innocent people. That couldn’t be true, either. “Maybe,” she said. “What will we do without her?” Rachel asked then.
“What?”
“After Mom dies,” Rachel said, “what will you and I do?”
“Oh,” he said, still focusing entirely on the ship.
She just said it then. “I need new bras. I’m growing, I guess.�
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Her father flubbed it and let the mainsail fall. “Really?” he said, actually looking at her.
“Please don’t stare,” she said.
He looked away. “How will we do that?”
“Maybe you could drive me to the mall and give me some money. You don’t have to come in or anything.”
“Sure,” he said. “That sounds like a plan.”
And it seemed to Rachel then that she and her father would figure out how to be survivors, how to be stranded and left behind together. “It’s a plan,” Rachel said.
* * *
It was true. Rachel openly admitted it. She was mean. But it was also true that this meanness had been leaving her for some time now, seeping away a little bit every day as fall became winter, as the relentless light turned white and cold and more distant, as the rain of a Sonoran spring returned and the days grew long and, a few weeks later, the sky became a vacuous hot sheet of blue in which the sun turned on again, bristled, beat down on everything, and made the air warp and bend. The meanness was leaving her and she felt its gradual departure. Just as everything else left, just as everything else was only temporary, so was her hurtfulness. When the saleslady with large hair and drawn eyebrows who sold her three blouses at Nordstrom winked at her and her father and said, “It’s sweet to see a man shopping with his daughter. We don’t get that often,” Rachel felt a little bit of the meanness falling away. When Rachel said carefully at the dinner table at Rand’s house, “Diese Kartoffeln schmecken gut!” which meant “These potatoes taste good” (and they did taste good), and Rand and his parents applauded her for her pronunciation, she felt a little bit more of it go. Even when the director of the hospice where her mother would soon go to die, a woman who wore round wire spectacles and had close-cropped hair like ruffled feathers, said, “Our central belief here is that death is part of life, that families and their loved ones should be made as comfortable as possible in a comfortable, natural setting,” to which Rachel thought, What do you know, you bitch? even then Rachel knew her meanness would leave, would go finally.