“When Lenore was here, we had Miranda-and-Desiree Band-Aids, actually,” Daisy said. She described the bandages and how they’d been decorated with illustrations of the banged-up faces of the girls of Rothgutt’s. Miranda had had a black eye and a swollen lip. Desiree had had a seeping gash on her forehead and a red nose all out of joint.
“I can’t imagine the scratch is as much as you’re making it out to be,” Muscatine said.
“Lenore would never forgive me if I didn’t look after you,” Daisy said.
“Lenore,” Muscatine said, mumbling, musing, already picking at the edge of the Band-Aid on his neck. “Can I see where Lenore slept?” he said.
As we followed Daisy and Muscatine up the stairs, Tiff took my arm in hers, and we leaned in toward each other like sisters lost. “Why did Muscatine come to see you?” Tiff whispered in my ear.
“He knows me by my obituaries,” I whispered back.
Whereas Lenore’s room had once been spare and empty, devoid of any girlish concerns, it had since become overrun with childhood. Atop the bed’s ruffled pink quilt was a small menagerie of stuffed animals. A paper lantern, powered by a motor with a soothing hum, spun slowly atop the nightstand, sending silhouettes of fish and mermaids swimming along the wall. And stuck in the corners of the vanity mirror were photo after photo of children posing for their school portraits, their smiles caged by orthodontia, their pigtails drawn what looked to be painfully tight, or their collars or pinafores freshly stiffened.
“Some of these children are missing,” Daisy said, running her fingers along the edge of the vanity mirror. “Some of them aren’t. People send them to me from all over, to comfort me. I don’t know how people think I could be comforted by the missing.” She sat on the little stool in front of the mirror, folding her hands in her lap. She took a breath, and as she exhaled, her posture slackened. She seemed tired of us, all of us. She seemed the Little Match Girl in reverse, escaping into not a happy fantasy but a darker one, into deeper delusions of loss.
Muscatine, perhaps seizing on this vulnerability, stood behind Daisy and buttoned the top buttons at the back of her dress, the ones she must’ve been unable to reach. “Can I see the book?” he said.
“What book?” Daisy said.
“The book you’ve been reading from,” he said. “The one Lenore wrote. I’d just like to look at it.”
Daisy stayed seated. “During the last big storm, when the power went out, Lenore read by candlelight,” she said. She picked up a plastic bottle of a girl’s nail glitter and brushed some onto her thumbnail. “She wanted to hurry and finish the tenth Miranda-and-Desiree before summer ended. Not even the noise of the wind tearing everything up outside could stop her.” I could see Lenore as we’d been seeing all our children that summer and fall—her longing for the final book even as she dreaded the story ending forever. Maybe that was what made us so vulnerable to the mythology of Lenore—the fragility of childhood, and the heartbreak of it, and how, when you’re so young, a season can seem endless.
Daisy put the nail polish away, stood, and left the room, crooking her finger, beckoning us to follow her. Muscatine touched one of the photos on the vanity. He seemed to be considering filching it, but he snapped his hand away quickly when Daisy poked her head back in. “Come with me,” she said. She led us downstairs to where her CB sat atop a sideboard of dark wood. She opened the top drawer and took from it the red notebook, which she handed to Muscatine. He opened the notebook with reverence.
“Logophilia,” he muttered. Tiff and I later looked it up, a magnifying glass hovering over the minuscule print of my dictionary that had warped with the weight of its own sodden, stained pages, our eyes watering from the dust—logophilia: an obsession with words. “I’d like to buy this from you,” he said. He took from his coat pocket a handful of wadded-up cash, as if children had paid him directly with their sweaty clutches of dollar bills.
· 48 ·
Daisy invited us to leave. We all three slunk from the house, mortified, bundled up in our coats not so much from the cold as from embarrassment, and we barely spoke as Tiff chauffeured us back toward town. Muscatine offered me a black licorice cough drop from his coat pocket, and I refused with a curt shake of my head.
“Are you mad at me?” he asked.
“No,” I lied. “I just don’t happen to have a cough.”
“But you eat cough drops all the time, you said. Even when you don’t cough.”
I didn’t remember having mentioned that in my letters to him. Had I really revealed something so mundane? But it pleased me that he remembered, and he seemed pleased that I was pleased, so I politely took the cough drop from him, exchanging a static shock with the touch of our fingertips. We both took responsibility for the static, and we both apologized, but we said nothing more until we pulled up in front of the bed-and-breakfast where Muscatine was booked under an assumed name. Trammell House was a little seafoam-green Victorian with plastic sunflower-shaped pinwheels spinning unseasonably among the bare rosebushes.
“We don’t smoke in Trammell House,” he said, feigning snootiness, eyebrow raised, digging for his cigarettes. “But these old houses are full of poison. They’re killing their guests with mold and radon and gas leaks. At least my cigarette has a filter to protect me.” He kept still, the unlit cigarette between his fingers. “Hey,” he said, his mood suddenly lifting, “you should come in for a drink! Mrs. Trammell said to help myself to anything in the credenza.”
Tiff said, “I don’t touch the stuff,” which made Muscatine giggle. He still didn’t move from the pickup.
“I just wanted to read the book, that’s all,” he said after a pause. “I didn’t mean to upset her.”
“Give me a spoiler,” Tiff said. “From the real book. Yours. Do they find their mother?”
“They’re sent home to their mother, but they don’t much care for her. So they join a traveling carnival, feigning a conjoined life.” I’m not sure that Tiff believed him—it sounded like a destiny Muscatine invented on the spot. Sensing her doubt, he continued, “They spend the rest of their days and nights, onstage and off, wearing one dress made from two dresses sewn together.” He checked Tiff’s reaction again, then ventured forth with more: “They see all the world—Paris, Morocco, the North and South Poles.” He paused. “They wear shared bloomers.” He paused again. “They change their names to Sherry and Cheri, the Von Splitt Twins.”
“I love it!” Tiff said, probably just to get him to stop.
We said our good-nights, and we promised we’d write.
“Be good to your granny,” Muscatine told Tiff. “And to your mother. Kindness to your family costs you almost nothing but affords a wealth of goodwill.”
“Is that from something?” I asked. “Did somebody say that?”
“Not that I know of,” he said. “I guess I said it. Just now.”
I put my hand on his arm. “Don’t worry too much about your daughter,” I said.
He patted my hand and shrugged. “The son of A. A. Milne—the inspiration for Christopher Robin—died furious at his father,” he said. “He accused his father of blemishing his good name. And the little boy named Peter who inspired J. M. Barrie to create Peter Pan? He eventually committed suicide. And so did the son of Kenneth Grahame, the author of The Wind in the Willows. Tossed themselves under a train, both of them. Well, different trains, at different times.”
As he stepped from the pickup, he said, seemingly as an afterthought, “I want you to write my obituary, as a matter of fact.”
“I’ll die long before you do,” I said. “How old are you, anyway?”
“I’m sixty-eight,” he said.
“A baby,” I said. His gaze had been often defined as child-like, probably because of its pristine glassiness. His eyes looked as if freshly bought from an oculist’s cabinet.
“I’ll commission you to write my obit now,” he said, “while we’re both alive; then we’ll auction it off for some charity. We’ll save li
ves with my obituary. What a way to go, ay?”
I watched him as he returned to Trammell House, as he followed every exaggerated curve in the winding stone walk. Only as he attempted to spark his cigarette with a lighter in the sleet did we all realize he’d left his umbrella in the umbrella-shaped umbrella stand in my front hallway.
· 49 ·
Tiff and I stayed up late drinking cocoa in the parlor, Tiff on the sofa with Muscatine’s red umbrella opened above her, its handle against her shoulder as she spun it around like a parasol. She parted the sheers of the front window with her pinkie and glanced across the street. “It’s really kind of obvious, don’t you think?” she said. “I move in with my mom, and days later, Doc’s got another family in the works.”
“I’m not sure that’s what’s happening,” I said.
“I just think he needs to be careful with those two. In case you haven’t noticed, they’re a real couple of weaklings. If he gets that little girl attached to him, it’s going to tear her up when things don’t work out with Hailey.”
“Things aren’t going to work out with Hailey?” I said.
Tiff shrugged and fell contemplative. “I think the reason I’m an insomniac,” she said, “is because I was born at midnight. Don’t you think it’s terrible that doctors spank babies first thing? An act of abuse right from the get-go.”
“I don’t know if they do that anymore,” I said.
“Why did they ever do it to begin with?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you can tell if the baby’s breathing properly if it shrieks like a banshee.”
“You had a baby once,” Tiff said. “It didn’t occur to you to ask them why they were beating the hell out of your newborn?”
“I was probably feeling a little beaten down myself at the moment,” I said. Just before my son’s birth, we’d moved to a tiny town in a valley of the sandhills of western Nebraska, where my husband had had ambitions of becoming a cattle rancher. I would spend my days pregnant and eating peanuts by the handful, my typewriter balanced precipitously on a deep windowsill in the bunkhouse, writing my obituaries and letting the peanut shells just fall on the floor. My father would mail me news of the latest dead, and I’d mail back to him the obits I wrote. The typewriter had been pushed up against a crack in the glass of the window that had been just wide enough for a rattler to slither through one afternoon as I wrote about the dearly departed Cloris Thorne, who’d drowned in a flooded ravine. A neighbor came over to club the snake with the back of his hoe.
“What time of day was my mom born?” Tiff asked. “What was that day like?”
“I actually don’t really recall,” I said. “I think I remember her father handing out bubble-gum cigars to the nurses. But maybe that was when Doc was born.”
“What time of day was Doc born?”
I shook my head and sighed. “I don’t recall that either.” I saw a gnat on the brim of my cup. It struggled in a bubble of my hot cocoa gone cold, and I wiped it away with my thumb.
“Did you write any of it down in a baby book? Did you write it down anywhere?” Tiff asked.
“No,” I said. “If I did, I don’t know where it would be.”
“Now that’s all just lost?” Tiff said, clucking her tongue. “It’s all just gone, that family history? Why wouldn’t you at least write it down?”
“Who thinks they’ll ever forget?” I said. “And who thought my son would die before I did?”
I told Tiff about my house in the sandhills, the rattler, and how, after the rattler had nearly fanged me, my father had written a stern letter to my husband, threatening to come up and collect me himself if he didn’t abandon his ranching career and bring me home straightaway to have my baby in a civilized manner, in a land where the snakes were of a toothless variety.
Tiff pulled from her pocket her cell phone and began to text herself. “I’m writing that down,” she said. “Rattler. Sandhills. You don’t get to just take our whole family history with you, S.”
Tiff appeared to feel bad for evoking the very real possibility of my imminent death, and she returned her gaze back across the street, to Doc’s dark house. When I heard a few sniffles, I asked her if she was crying behind the umbrella, and she said no.
It’s startling, Ivy had said to Tiff the other day, in relation to some mouthy comment Tiff had tossed off in my direction, the way you talk to your great-grandma. You’re too familiar with her.
Yes, she’s familiar with me, I’d snapped at Ivy, right there in front of Tiff, because I’ve been there for her for years. I’d immediately felt guilty for saying it, but she simply hadn’t understood what damage she might be doing. If Tiff became angry with me, felt the need to tiptoe, what would become of all that we had?
“Somebody’s here again,” Tiff mumbled, her jaw resting on the back of the sofa. “A guy on a bike.”
I answered the door when the young man knocked, and he handed me a brown-paper bag stapled shut, with an envelope attached. “An old guy at my mom’s B-and-B gave me a hundred bucks to drop this by,” he said, grinning, seeming to be under the impression he’d suckered someone.
Back in the parlor, Tiff tore into the sack to discover that Muscatine had sneaked her a copy of The Coffins of Little Hope, and without a word, she ran her fingers along the grooves of the embossed letters of the title. I opened the envelope. You’ll see that I lied, Muscatine wrote, when you asked me to spoil the plot.
Despite my constant criticizing her for it, Tiff had always been one of those children who read the last page first of every book. The pages of Coffins, made from pulverized coffee chaff and dryer lint and other charming refuse, were peppered with wildflower seeds. Tiff lay on her back in front of the fireplace and read aloud to me the last paragraph, the narrator directing his reader to rip the pages out and bury them in the dirt of the yard or, for the unfortunate urbanites, in the narrow soil of a window box. If the flowers struggle up, strangling from the dirt, then bloom in the sun, the narrator says in the final lines of the final chapter of this final book, you’ll know that Miranda and Desiree finally escaped the walls of Rothgutt’s, and they’ve been to spy in your windows, to laugh and weep at the lovely life you lead, to be jealous of even your worst circumstances. As they’ve mocked you for not appreciating all the wonderful things you have, seeds have spilled from the holes in their apron pockets. But even if no flowers grow, please don’t worry. We’re sure Miranda and Desiree are fine, nonetheless. Quite sure of it. Please, please, we beg that you don’t worry at all. Don’t give yourself a stomachache about it, for God’s sake. They’re very, very, very, very resourceful girls, as I’m sure you’ve come to realize. They’ll be just fine, I suppose.
Tiff flipped back to the front of the book. Only a few chapters in, after I’d nodded off several times as she read to me, I felt my head fall back and my eyes close, but I seemed somehow to be reading the page, the story taking an even more fantastical slant—babies plucked the wings off frogs—and then I was reading about myself at Rothgutt’s, an orphaned girl, having been locked away for having killed her own mother in childbirth. I was thirteen, but in that way of dreams, I was also an old woman, and in a blink the mother I’d killed became Lenore in a glass coffin. In her breath that fogged the glass, Lenore wrote, Wake up. I looked around at the other girls to see if they saw what I saw, and when I tried to speak, to tell them Lenore was alive, I couldn’t find the right words.
I woke up then, saying, “Wake up,” and Tiff laughed at me.
“Go to bed,” she said, and her eyes fell back upon the page. She put her finger to the paper, just beneath the words, to guide herself along; so densely packed were the narrow lines of text that she often accidentally reread the line she’d just finished reading, as if the book conspired to keep her stuck, sending the same images through her thoughts in a loop.
· 50 ·
I woke in my bed late in the morning, though I couldn’t remember having left the parlor. I sat up and called out Tiff�
�s name, hoping she wouldn’t answer, hoping she’d had the sense to go to school without prompting. If I let her stay home a second day in a row, I feared there’d likely be some kind of intervention. I would appear indulgent and slovenly. “Tiff!” I called again, and I heard her feet fast on the stairs.
“What is it!” she said, running up to the footboard. “Are you okay?”
“Am I okay?” I said. “No. No, not at all. I’m not okay. I’m in deep trouble. It’s ten in the morning and you’re not in school, are you?”
“Don’t scare me like that, Essie,” she said.
“You should be scared,” I said.
Tiff crawled into bed with me, beneath my quilts. “I haven’t slept a wink,” she said, smiling and fluttering her eyelashes. “I finished the book. Did you hear me fall around 2 in the morning? I had to go to the bathroom but didn’t want to stop reading, and I fell up the stairs. I wasn’t watching where I was going.” She tossed the quilts aside and lifted her kimono above her knee to show me a nasty patch of black and blue on the back of her leg.
“Oh, Tiffany,” I said. I went to my vanity in an effort to wrestle my hair into something presentable. “Go get dressed. I’m giving you back to your mother.”
Tiff ignored me, preoccupied as she was by invading my privacy, riffling through the drawer of my nightstand. She pinched the bulb of a perfume atomizer to douse her neck and chest with a lavender scent. She slipped on my black sleeping mask, which I hadn’t worn since a bout of sleeplessness in the 1950s. “Turns out that Coffin is the family name,” Tiff said, her eyes hidden by the mask. “Miranda and Desiree Coffin. Their family lives in a village called Little Hope, which is a tiny community just outside the town of Big Hope.” She shrugged, unimpressed with Muscatine’s wordplay. In Daisy’s version, the coffins of the title had been means of escape, Miranda and Desiree tucked into a pair of pine boxes and liberated from the asylum in a horse-drawn hearse by a sympathetic undertaker’s apprentice.
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