“Repay with what?” Q. asked.
“You must repay the seen world with what was given to you. And you must repay the unseen world too.”
“Just tell me what to do. I don’t understand all that repaying stuff,” Q. said, getting impatient.
“You were born in debt, and your death is the ultimate repayment. But in the meantime you must show gratitude until that day comes.”
“I think I understand but if you just tell me what you want me to do.”
“The powers will not just sit back and be patient. So think it through carefully. Being given a child is adding to your debt. You mustn’t forget that. And maybe they’ll ask more of you than you’re willing to give.”
“I won’t forget. I won’t.”
“This is what I need from you, then,” Aella said and whispered in her ear.
Q. nodded. She was well versed in deceit and barely flinched. Q. was generous too. Whatever people gave Aella to keep a lover or get rid of an enemy, she added two zeroes and multiplied it by three.
Shortly thereafter they parted ways. There were the demons in Q.’s life—Aella could almost see them as she watched her walk to her truck that day. They were in close pursuit, some so close that they were tightening around her neck. Aella thought Q. must surely feel that they were squeezing the air out of her. There was this conviction about her, as if Q. was convinced a child would persuade fate to let go of her or get tired of suffocating her altogether. Love was what Q. was looking for, a love so strong that it would heal her.
Aella shook her head as Q. took off down the road. If there was one thing she should have told her, it was that love was powerful, but fate was unstoppable.
Thirty-three
DAHLIA
Iwatch my mother pull clothes from the closet. She haphazardly throws them onto the bed, where they end up in a chaotic heap.
“Are you okay?” I ask as she rips down the last few pieces of clothing from the rod.
“I’m looking for something,” she says.
I watch her take a yellow dress off a hanger, gently straightening the folds of the skirt. She shakes it to get off the dust. As if she found what she had been looking for, her body seems to fold in on itself, her shoulders droop, her movements become slow. Before my eyes, she retreats into her very own world, and it scares me to see her this way.
Lately, she’s been seemingly fine—no more setting houses on fire, running off, or doubling up on meds—but she has replaced her anxiety with something entirely different. In those moments of metamorphosis, she becomes someone I don’t know. This has been happening a lot lately; we talk and suddenly she’s far gone, as if she just decided to be somewhere else. It is a visible transformation. Her face changes as if it has been taken apart, just to later emerge from that state, all put back together again. She is in deep thought, almost disappearing, but then she straightens her back and shakes it off.
“I miss her,” my mother says, and I don’t know who she’s talking about.
“Who?” I ask.
She’s far away, her eyes are off into the distance, her hands running over the fabric of the now-dingy dress with visible moth holes.
“I love you, Mom. Are you okay?”
She snaps out of it. “I’m fine,” she says and puts the dress back on the wooden rod, a lonely example of something she’s trying to hold on to while all the rest is in a pile on the bed. I feel as if I’m an intruder and so I let her be.
Back in my room, as I put on my shoes, I stare at the missing wall again. The tacks don’t look familiar and it’s not exactly as I would have put it up. At that moment I know, know with certainty, that I didn’t put this wall up, and I know that my mother is the one who did. I can tell by the way the pages are haphazardly arranged—I would have organized them by date—that she put them up for me to see. To behold. To contemplate. But I don’t know why. I can’t make out what she’s trying to tell me. Maybe it’s nothing at all, just a random firing of her already detached brain.
The world around me starts to blur like an out-of-focus photograph. My mind is foggy and I’m terror-stricken and excited all at once. The wall swirls and the papers merge as my head tilts toward the floor, and every muscle in my body knots up as the realization floods in: I am seeing something important.
I stare at the photograph of Jane’s bracelet, remember her chipped nails, and the ship’s wheel charm comes into focus. I’m falling, tilting toward something beneath me that doesn’t seem to have a bottom to it—a well, maybe, because I smell dank and standing water—but the expected contact with the ground doesn’t come and instead I continue to fall, only the world around me is utterly dark.
A melody plays, accompanied by an image of myself walking through a meadow bursting with flowers. The feeling is joyful, like skipping off to school, but just when I speed up, someone grabs my hand. I turn and there is Jane. She holds on to my hand with a tight grasp. I attempt to twist my hand loose but I can’t and I look down and I see a bracelet around her wrist. Clinking charms playing a gentle cantata. What a majestic vision.
But there’s more.
Someone is following us. I hold on to Jane’s hand and together we run. I’m afraid there’s a black dog with bared fangs after us and I try not to be afraid. This fear weighs heavy on me but I know what to do: I talk myself full of courage like I used to when I was alone as a child in some unfamiliar hotel room.
Jane’s hand slips out of mine. Someone grabs me by the arm and I jerk to a stop.
Bordeaux has caught up with me.
I fall into the feeling—no, I fly into it—and I’m afraid I’ll soar through a world filled with spinning silver baubles for all of eternity.
—
My mother called an ambulance and they took me to the hospital. I don’t remember any of it. Not the ambulance, not Bobby, not my mother at the hospital, not any doctors or nurses.
What Dr. Wagner does tell me in his office is that I had a big one, the granddaddy of them all; a grand mal seizure. And a second one in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. “It was touch and go, Dahlia, touch and go,” he says.
My body is sore but other than that I feel okay. Initially I don’t get his comment, but then it sinks in. These kind of seizures can kill.
“Your medication levels are in the therapeutic region, and now we have to assume that medication is either not going to help or your kind of seizures don’t respond to it at all. I fear you’ll have to make a decision.”
“A decision?”
“Surgery. We are going to have to remove your olfactory bulb.”
“Brain surgery?”
“Yes.”
“It seems radical.”
“The next seizure could kill you, Dahlia, let me be very clear about this. The seizures cause the scents and visions, and this one could have been your last one. We have to eliminate the root of the problem.”
I want to tell him about my Jane and how everything is coming together and that I’m going to need just a little while longer to sort this all out.
“It does sound radical, I agree,” Dr. Wagner says. “I understand you’ll need some time to think this through. We’ll talk in a couple of days, okay? You’ll need to check in a few days early to have a physical, some blood work, some more tests, in order to get you ready for surgery. But you shouldn’t hold off much longer.”
“What if . . .” I hesitate and struggle to find the right words. What if I refuse? What if I don’t consent?
“Dahlia, over the course of days you went from partial seizures that went undetected to two grand mal seizures, both within minutes of each other. There’s really no room for anything but surgery.”
“What will be different after you remove the olfactory bulb?”
“Your sense of smell will be gone. Food will be bland. There might be disruption of pheromones.”
&
nbsp; I think of the fragrance of the wildflowers in the meadow behind the farm. Spoiled food, smoke, old sheets, spilled alcohol—the kind of smells that hit me when I enter a room at the Lark. The scent of coffee in the lobby, the donuts, the vanilla and lavender room spray. The way the farm smells of wood and Tallulah’s scent after she’s had a bath. Bobby’s skin, sangria, and whiskey. The way an orange smells when you peel it, how it just bursts and comes at you all at once. My mother’s cigarettes, the smell of her hair dye, the scent of her lotion reminding me of ripe plums.
I have just days to decide about the surgery, but I have too much on my mind. I get lost in all the ifs and buts and then I remind myself that I can’t stop now. I can’t allow for anything to interfere with this thing that is going on with me: my mother and her stories, the bracelet in the photograph and the vision I had of Bordeaux. The last thing I need is to halt my life and have brain surgery. There’s so much riding on me and my ability to keep this all together. In addition to my mother, there’s Tallulah, who is finally coming home today.
I leave Dr. Wagner’s office, and at the vet’s I cry when I see Tallulah come through the door. She looks good; her eyes are lively and her whole body moves as her tail makes circular motions. She licks my hands and my face. I gently rub her shaved belly. The vet appears and gives me instructions for her care—Keep her from scratching the incision on her belly . . . the sutures dissolve on their own . . . no need to bring her back . . . call if anything comes up . . . we’ll call in a couple of days to see how she’s doing—and we leave. I lift her onto the seat, and the entire drive out to the farm her paws are firmly planted on the middle console.
I imagine having to take her back to the shelter, knowing my mother’s ability to care for her in my absence is nonexistent. Right then I know that my surgery isn’t going to happen.
Later that night, Tallulah is curled up on the couch next to me, in and out of sleep; she wakes frequently. Every time she opens her eyes, I rub her ears, making sure she knows she’s home and here to stay.
My mother sits with me, and she begins her ritual. She starts innocently enough, little vignettes of someone else’s life, some outrageous, some less so, all about the woman my mother calls Quinn. There are two kinds of storytellers—the ones who tell good stories and the ones who tell great lies—and I just don’t know which kind she belongs to. Judging by her past, she belongs to the latter.
Then my mother’s story takes a strange turn. I call it strange because it starts to bleed into the present in ways I would have never thought possible.
Thirty-four
MEMPHIS
MEMPHIS keeps telling herself that she must be fair in her judgment of Dahlia. After all, she knows nothing of sacrifices, nothing about the things Memphis had to give up. Over and over she had to leave everything behind on those moves—most of it inconsequential and menial, yet it meant everything to her—and she hopes Dahlia will come to understand. When she’s done telling the story, Dahlia must understand.
She watches Dahlia as she listens, her head cocked to the side, hanging on her every word. Memphis tries not to give anything away, spoon-feeds it to her—she’s been increasingly fragile lately, those seizures and visions she’s been having—and the story of Quinn sometimes feels so far removed from reality and Memphis has to remind herself that she is doing more than just dredging up buried memories. She tells Dahlia a story that was entrusted to her. She has been holding on to it for many years, and now it is her obligation to release it from her memory.
Dahlia was in the shed the day before the seizure that put her in the hospital. Memphis had watched her when she came upon the open door and how she had shone the flashlight into the darkened shed and then just turned around and let it be. Memphis had unlatched the door, had left it gaping as if it was an invitation to enter, but Dahlia didn’t see what Memphis sees every time she passes by the warped wooden shack.
Be patient, Memphis tells herself; in due time. She repeats it three times, like an incantation she wants to conjure into reality.
She watches Dahlia on the couch, rubbing the dog behind her ears.
Animals have always had a special place in Dahlia’s heart. Memphis is still pained that she never allowed her to have a dog all those years on the road, wouldn’t even allow her to befriend the stray cats in the motel parking lots, would remove the bowls of food and saucers filled with milk, didn’t want her to get attached and then have to leave. It was like setting her up for heartbreak.
Memphis jerks herself out of the past, reminds herself to be on point.
“There was this man who lived around here, long time ago. He had a big white dog. Called her Ghost. It was a fitting name.”
Dahlia continues to rub Tallulah’s ears, and the dog scoots even closer to her.
“Let me tell you about Ghost,” Memphis says. “She had the most beautiful coat you can imagine.”
—
Quinn was maddened. With a deep and powerful anger inside her she grew silent around Nolan, became unresponsive toward him as if he wasn’t even there. She felt hate for him in such a way that it wasn’t even comparable to the indiscretion of having taken advantage of Tain. This was not Tain’s doing. It was all Nolan.
Rape. Yes, rape it was—after all, Tain was simpleminded, hardly able to keep herself clean. She was naïve and so much more child than adult, dependent on Quinn for so many things. Repetitive chores she did well, but one could never expect Tain to make an independent decision. She’d walk right by an open window through which the rains were splashing on the freshly polished floor unless you had sent her to close it. Only snapped the beans when reminded, never because it was time to prepare dinner.
But the baby—there was the baby. Quinn had stopped hoping altogether. The night of the stillbirth she was devastated but she knew why it had happened. Aella had been clear—Follow my instructions, she had said, don’t deviate, and later Aella had asked Quinn if she had done everything the way she had asked her to.
Quinn answered yes. But that was a lie. She couldn’t do what Aella had asked her to do, just couldn’t. The instructions had been clear: she had to go find a bitch and before she gave birth, she had to hang her—literally hang her, strangling her to death from a tree, cut open her belly, and take the first living puppy and bring it to Aella.
Those were the instructions, but Quinn knew she wasn’t made for such a task. But she needed a puppy and so Quinn had walked down to Seymour’s place, the old retired teacher, knowing that his Great Pyrenees was about to give birth. She had been visiting him, asking him how he knew the birth was imminent, and Seymour had told her what to look for—Ghost had been sneaking into the barn, making a nest from straw and old blankets—and that night she went out to Seymour’s place. She snuck into the barn and made her way to the straw arrangement where Ghost was going to give birth any day.
But it was too late. Ghost had already pushed the puppies out and they were feeding off her engorged teats as she lay on her side, exhausted, barely looking up. There was one pup, smaller than the others, and it had been pushed off to the side. It was cold and Quinn knew it was dead, stillborn, and what difference did it make it anyway if she passed the dead puppy for the one the instructions required. Quinn had known all along that she’d never be able to go through with such a gory thing, would never be able to cut a puppy from its mother. Quinn didn’t put many things past herself—she reckoned she could, given the right circumstances, strike out. If she was completely honest with herself, she knew she could kill in a moment of desperation, but committing such an atrocious crime against an innocent animal—Quinn didn’t have that in her.
By the light of a single flashlight beam, she picked up the still bundle and cradled it. She lifted it to her mouth and blew her warm breath on the pink nose as if she was going to be able to resurrect it by breathing her very own life into it. Ghost lifted her head and after she glanced at the suckling
pups, she put her head back down and closed her eyes.
Quinn wrapped the dead pup in a piece of fabric she found in the barn and made her way to Aella’s trailer in the woods. She knocked on the door and Aella opened it and let her in. The trailer smelled of smoke and herbs, sweet and spicy. She handed Aella the bundle and she took it, unfolded the fabric, and smiled. It wasn’t a smile of perversion or one that took solace in the stiff little body, its bare belly and pink pads, just sheer approval of the fact that Quinn had done as she was told.
“What do I do now? Just wait?” Quinn asked.
“You stay and watch,” Aella said and stepped toward the stove.
Quinn’s stomach dropped but she sat at the kitchen table, a shabby and crooked affair covered in herbs and other plants growing in pots.
She watched Aella do things she didn’t understand: there was a joyous fire and herbs were burning, filling the trailer with smoke. At some point Aella put the pup down and went outside. Quinn, through the window, watched Aella dig in the yard, under the oak, just to return and empty the contents of a glass bottle into the pot that was on the stove, turning up the heat. After a while steam developed, more steam than Quinn had ever seen come from a pot of boiling water. In no time, the windows were blind with condensation and there seemed to be a presence in the room. It wasn’t visible by any ordinary means, but Quinn felt they were not alone.
Aella addressed the presence—Quinn didn’t understand any of the words—and then she fanned the steam coming from the pot toward Quinn.
“Step closer,” Aella said and moved aside.
Quinn did as she was told, making sure not to look inside the pot, but she needn’t have worried, the steam and smoke coming off the stove were too thick for her to make out anything. Quinn took in a deep breath. The steam mixture was oddly comforting, and seemed to clear her mind. The smoke became thicker then, taking her breath away. Quinn coughed and had to sit down until the spell was over.
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