by Melanie Tem
When she got home Mark was sick in bed. Dad was there, home early from work, taking care of him. She didn’t see Mama.
“He’s running a little fever, honey,” Dad said, but it didn’t look like a little fever. Mark was shaking all over. At first she thought maybe Mark was faking. But he kept throwing up. Even water made him throw up. His skin was the color of concrete. Dad said, too many times, “It’s just the flu. Everybody gets the flu.” But Elizabeth saw how worried he looked, and she didn’t want to see, so she went to her room and shut the door and sat on her bed for a while, trying not to think about Mama.
She thought about whether she should tell Heather what Julie said about her. “You should be the one who stops gossip,” Mama would have said. But maybe if she told Heather then Heather would be her friend and let her stay at her house.
She thought about Jeff. He was pretty much of a jerk, and she was sure he did drugs, and she didn’t understand why she was so attracted to him. “He’s dangerous,” Mama told her. “Lots of women find dangerous men attractive. Nothing wrong with feeling that way. But you don’t have to act on your feelings.”
Elizabeth threw herself face down on her bed and covered her head with her pillow. Mama is dead.
“It’s not fair,” Mama said, not loud but in a way that Elizabeth knew meant she was really really mad. “I’ve been cheated.” I’ve been cheated, too, Elizabeth found herself thinking, and fell asleep, and dreamed that Mama was in Mark’s room, taking care of him, grinning, wrapping her arms around him, hugging him, hurting him, too, making him sick.
Mark died before morning. Elizabeth woke up because Dad was moaning, and she didn’t want to go see what was the matter, but she couldn’t help it. Dad was on Mark’s bed, crying, with Mark’s body in his arms, and Mama was standing in the shadows with her hands over her face.
“Oh, honey,” Mama said softly, and went over to Elizabeth, and before Elizabeth could pull away Mama kissed her lightly on the cheek with lips as dry as dead leaves, lips that smelled of earth, and insects, but most of all, of copper.
“You should’ve called the doctor,” she accused her father, then felt terrible for talking to him like that, for putting him through even more pain.
“I know, I know …” he said from his chair in the shadows. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Sometimes I know what I should be doing about something, and I think about it, but for some reason I can’t seem to do anything.” His voice sounded weak, kind of crackly, as if he were speaking to her on a long distance connection. “I just want to sit here. I just want to sit, and do nothing.”
“But, Daddy … you have to … have to take care of Mark. His body? Daddy, please!”
“Honey, it’s okay. I … took care of things. They came for it while you were sleeping.”
“But the funeral?”
“We’ll have it later, honey. A memorial service, at least. With the neighbors, and Mark’s friends. There’ll be time. I’m … I’m going to ask them to cremate the body. I think that would be best.”
“Daddy …”
“Hush now, baby. Hush …”
“Daddy, it was Mama’s idea wasn’t it? Having Mark cremated. So people wouldn’t find out what she did …”
“Baby, oh honey …” Dad pulled her close. “I’m so sorry. I should have paid more attention. We all loved your mom very much. But she’s dead, honey. She’s dead.”
Elizabeth pulled away and looked at him. He thought he was telling the truth. She could see it in his eyes.
“Daddy? Daddy?”
But he was crying and couldn’t answer her anymore. Elizabeth got up and started for the door, but stopped when she saw her mother standing there in the shadows.
“You don’t feel good, Elizabeth. It’s understandable. Maybe you should stay home from school today and rest? Mama will take care of you, sweetheart,” she said, and grinned with something dark staining the grin, and held her soft mothering arms out to hug her, but Elizabeth pushed past, shuddering.
She didn’t go to school the next day. Or the day after that. Her Dad understood, of course. He knew she was grieving. He’d just call her in sick and explain everything later. He’d take care of her.
But he couldn’t. Sure she was grieving, but she was staying home because she had to take care of him. She tried to call Stacey to apologize but the phone was dead. She wondered if maybe her Dad had disconnected it so that he wouldn’t have to talk to anybody. But then she wondered if maybe Mama had something to do with it.
She could go out, tell the police or something. But she and Mark were the only ones who had seen Mama, and now it was just her. She wasn’t a kid anymore, but they would think she was. Nobody listened to kids. They treated them like crazy people. They’d put her in the hospital or something and then Dad would be all alone with Mama. She couldn’t leave him alone in the house. Not even for a minute.
All day long Elizabeth’s mother walked back and forth in front of her father’s door. Waiting. But her father never came out. Not once. He might be dying in there, but if she opened her father’s door then Mama might get in there. And then she’d lose her daddy, too.
Elizabeth knew she was going to be left all alone. All alone in the house with her mother, who was dead, who had been dead for months.
Over the next couple of days people knocked at the front door, but they always went away. Elizabeth was afraid to go to the door, afraid of what Mama might do if somebody else learned about their perverted secret.
Elizabeth tried to learn as much as she could about Mama’s new routine. It made her feel a little safer. Every morning Mama shuffled slowly out of her bedroom as if she had almost no strength left for the day. Sometimes she had all her clothes on but sometimes she just wore a big torn slip. After an hour or so of standing in the hall outside her dad’s bedroom door Mama started walking around the house, avoiding the windows and just walking like she’d forgotten what it was she was supposed to do. Sometimes she’d stop walking and stand there with her head kind of sideways like she was listening for something, but maybe she’d forgotten what it was she was listening for.
Sometimes Mama would fix something on the stove and then just throw it into the garbage. Sometimes Elizabeth would see Mama eating flies. Sometimes Elizabeth would see a mouse’s head poke itself suddenly out of Mama’s mouth before getting pulled back inside again. Sometimes Mama’s chin would be covered with blood.
Elizabeth stayed out of Mama’s way the best she could, and although she didn’t exactly understand why, she figured she was pretty safe as long as Mama kept hanging around outside her Daddy’s bedroom door. It wasn’t too hard staying out of Mama’s way—she seemed pretty sleepy most of the time, like she’d had too much to eat or drink.
Sometimes Mama would call out her name, though. Sometimes Mama would look into Elizabeth’s empty room (she’d stopped sleeping in there days ago), and say, “Elizabeth? Elizabeth, honey? Do you need a hug? Let me give you a hug, sweetheart!”
And it would make Elizabeth depressed because Mama had never hugged her very much before—not like her friends’ moms—and she’d always wanted her mama to hug her like those moms did. She did need a hug right now for sure, but not from Mama.
And after a while she started seeing Mark around the house, and then she knew her daddy had never gotten around to ordering the cremation. And she was almost glad, but not quite. Sometimes Mark would walk through the house, and eat flies, and call out to Elizabeth with sugar in his voice asking if she would give him a hug, too. And then he’d giggle, just like he used to, just like it was all a big joke he’d pulled on her.
Finally, one night when she could hear Mama and Mark in another room moving around and bumping into furniture and chasing things, Elizabeth slipped into her father’s bedroom. He was lying there on the floor in the dark very very still but she figured if she could just get him off the floor she could help him out of the house and they could stay at a neighbor’s house or in a hotel somewhere un
til they could figure out what else to do.
But then Elizabeth saw that her daddy didn’t have a face anymore, just part of a tongue sticking out with teethmarks along the edges where it had been chewed. And most of one leg was gone. But still she kept asking him if he could stand up, if he was ready to go now but he didn’t say a word. She’d let him down. Just like with Mama, she hadn’t been good enough.
Elizabeth was in the house alone with Mama and Mark. They’d never let her go. Even if she walked out the back door nobody would believe her and anyway Mark and Mama would never let her go. And it was almost time for her period, maybe only a couple of days away. And Elizabeth didn’t want to think about how Mama and her brother were going to act when her period came.
So that’s why she’s waiting in the kitchen now for Mama and Mark to come into the room and find her. Everybody always said she was just like her mother anyway. She guessed it must be true—they were always saying it and now look at Mama crawling into the room on her hands and knees and licking Elizabeth’s feet, and there’s Mark licking her hand and getting up, getting closer.
“I’m ready for my hug now,” she says, trying to keep her voice steady as her mother and brother come closer and wrap her in their terrible long arms and squeeze her in her family’s cold embrace until she isn’t alone anymore.
“I’m ready,” she says, smiling, thinking maybe that at last her Mama would be pleased, pleased that now she was so much like her. But the joke would be on Mama, Mama with her dirty little grownup secret.
Because Elizabeth would be even better than Mama. Even stronger.
NVUMBI
“Who needs men?” Jamie’s daughter Eliza demands with free floating adolescent vigor. “I mean, what good are they anyway?”
Jamie notices the light through the high kitchen window that opens onto the alley, a thin sliver like the slit in a door up to which, in another time and place, the sorcerer rode backwards. He notices the sounds of this particular city morning, the taste of the closely inhabited apartment air when he licks his dry lips.
Eliza’s mother, Jamie’s wife Danielle, is getting ready for work in the dark little bedroom off the kitchen. Through the doorless opening Jamie catches flashes of her bright red uniform, her pastel underwear, her skin which is golden tan. Danielle is a beautiful woman. He loves her, of course, if love can be defined as owing someone both your life and your death.
Jamie’s mother in law, Eliza’s grandmother and Danielle’s mother, Claudine, stands at the stove with her back to them, frying bacon for breakfast. The black skillet that Claudine calls a spider is full, and more raw striped pink strips wait on the counter. All the appetites of all the Miller women are prodigious. Jamie, of course, will eat very little.
Claudine is a tiny woman, and old. No outsider would see her power, which is part of her power. To neighbors and family and friends her power is obvious, a given part of life. Of Jamie’s life, certainly. Of his death. Thinking about how powerful Claudine is, how old, how small, Jamie is slightly unnerved.
“I mean, what good is he?” Eliza gestures toward Jamie with a sharp backward jerk of her head. Out of long habit, his hands stay with the abrupt movement and don’t lose the braid. Eliza’s hair is thick and coarse; it curls around his fingers like entrails scooped, prodded, divined. It resists the braiding, but pointlessly. Overt resistance is always pointless.
The dead do not resist.
Jamie spent months or years in the sorcerer’s bottle. He remembers that time as pleasant: sitting up on a shelf with thousands of similar bottles, aging, collecting dust. Until Danielle was ready for him and Claudine and Danielle came to claim him, and his tired old body, so poorly cared for down in the sorcerer’s cellar, was forced to inhale the contents of the bottle with those dry and tattered old nostrils. Forced to make the same mistakes over and over again.
A lifetime of hard labor, and then hard labor after death.
Eliza has hurt Jamie’s feelings. He is dimly surprised. His hands want to tremble among the braids he has made in his daughter’s hair, but they do not.
Claudine flourishes her spatula. The bacon sizzles. She mutters loudly, “Nvumbi.”
“Nvumbi my ass,” Eliza says brazenly under his hands. He stiffens and so does she, but she goes on recklessly, “Personally, I don’t even believe in nvumbi.”
Claudine whirls from the stove, spatula raised like the sorcerer’s forked, hooked stick. Jamie wonders if she’ll be buried with her spatula, what she’ll take with her into the next world or her next life in this one. Will she take him? He wonders how she’ll die, what he’ll do when she does.
Danielle flies out of the bedroom. Her uniform top is unsnapped over her lacy flesh colored bra, her flesh a rosy brown and the nipples concealed from Jamie but still there, still soft until he raises them with his tongue. She slaps Eliza hard across the face. Jamie’s hands stay with Eliza’s head as it recoils from her mother’s blow. He means to be gentle and steady for her, the father figure he’s been trained to be, but he’s sure he pulls her hair, and he’s faintly sorry.
Danielle leans close. Her breath smells like her morning coffee. “You watch your mouth, girl,” she says with quiet menace. Eliza is sobbing and leaning back against Jamie, against his groin. He can’t protect her, but her hair is almost done. “No call to disrespect nvumbi.”
Claudine observes, “Time to get her her own.”
Jamie sees alarm on his wife’s face and feels the surprising sinking of his own heart. Eliza has already stopped crying; she is, after all, a Miller woman.
Claudine nods twice and pronounces, “High time.”
“Ma,” Danielle begins. She glances at the clock and curses. She’s having trouble with the snaps on her uniform. Jamie fastens the last barrette onto the last of Eliza’s braids and crosses the narrow room to help Danielle. Her flesh is soft and pliant under his knuckles, her bones hard. He has touched her thousands of times during their marriage, and he’s never noticed such things before. She doesn’t look at him, just drops her hands and lets him dress her while she says to her mother, “Ma, she’s barely thirteen.”
Claudine takes the bacon strips out of the spider one by one. They dangle from her spatula, and drops of grease glitter. Jamie snaps the top snap of Danielle’s uniform; her flesh gives a little under his thumb, and the unaccustomed clarity of the sensation makes him take a step back from her. She catches his arm, pulls him to her, kisses him, puts her tongue in his mouth and keeps it there long enough that he thinks he might have stopped breathing. That has happened before.
“You were twelve,” Claudine points out.
“Yeah,” Danielle says into Jamie’s mouth. Her words, her coffee breath, her fat tongue make him want to gag, but she won’t let him. “Too young,” she says.
“Old enough for nvumbi.”
Nvumbi. People with weak and sickly souls, souls that cannot carry their weight through the world. The world is full of them. Nearly empty eyes, blank faces blankly animated, voices thin and skittering, hands sliding away from handshake or caress; they are easily identified while alive and easily turned after death.
Danielle was, yes, twelve years old when she got Jamie. He doesn’t remember much of what she looked like then; for a long time, he was vaguely aware only of her smell, the taste of certain parts of her body, the feel of her around him. Hearing came next, the sound of her voice, the sound of her voice saying his name and what he was to do, the sound of her breath and her heartbeat. Sight came only gradually, for some reason, and he wasn’t even aware of what he was seeing until he’d been seeing it for a long time. His wife Danielle is beautiful, of course. All the Miller women are beautiful. His daughter Eliza is the most beautiful of all.
There is danger in this.
Jamie doesn’t know how old he was when the Millers came to get him for Danielle. He doesn’t know how long he’d lived or how long he’d been dead, or whether there was any difference. He used to think he wouldn’t remember anything about
his life until the Miller women came to get him for the dead, they say, carry their memories like purses, easily stolen and easily spilled.
But now he does remember some of it, bits and pieces, like the silhouettes some old woman of his childhood used to snip out of thick black paper. Snip snip snip. Silhouettes of all the boy children. Dozens of silhouettes of Jamie, one after another after another as he grew up, arranged in an eerily lengthening row across a wall somewhere. He can’t remember whose wall it was, or where, or whether his silhouettes really were the only ones on it.
He doesn’t know why the silhouettes stopped, whether the old woman died or whether she decided at some point, for unfathomable reasons of her own, that there was no more need to cut out flat shadowy likenesses of Jamie. He doesn’t remember her name or what she looked like, only her hands and the small noise of her very sharp scissors, snipping, snipping.
He remembers a hot wet place, a country of shimmering light. Hot; he remembers being hot all the time, nights hot and hard to breathe, mornings and evenings hot, middays so hot that the earth itself shimmered and the rain turned to steam as it fell, rose back from the shimmering earth to fall again, fall again.
He remembers exhaustion. The constant motion of bodies at work in the fields, his body. The same stooping, cutting, pulling, stooping motion repeated so many times in a day, so many days in a lifetime, that the motion and the heat and the exhaustion and the beating of a heart and the breath in and out became the life, became this day and the next day and the next hot wet shimmering day.
He remembers a tunnel. A country full of light. Her hands on the stiff parts of his face. Her taste at the edges of his lips where his tongue can just reach. A shadow growing in the palm of her hand, the silhouette of someone’s face, someone’s hand, snip snip, not his. The shadow flutters its paper thin edges, gently rolls to the center of the bed and opens its face to him. It is a veil. Vaguely Jamie knows that he likes to wear this veil over his face, but he’s far from knowing why. He strokes it.