by Kelly Link
Last night at dinner, the R.M. set four places at the table, the blue plate for James, red for Hildy, orange for her husband, purple for herself. The R.M. likes routine, and her family accommodates. No one would ever eat off the wrong-colored plate – surely the food would not taste the same.
Hildy set a fifth place, yellow for Jenny Rose, while her mother was in the kitchen, and retrieved the fifth chair with the wobbly leg from her mother’s study. She did these things without saying anything: it seemed unthinkable to say anything to the R.M., who in any case, neither noticed her error nor saw that it had been corrected. At dinner, Jenny Rose did not speak – she hardly ate. No one spoke to her and it seemed to Hildy that no one even noticed her cousin.
She was as invisible as Hildy is now, under the green roof of the Ping-Pong table. She almost feels sorry for Jenny Rose.
Jenny Rose’s parents write her every week. Hildy knows this because Jenny Rose donates the stamps to Mr. Harmon’s stamp collection. Her father currently has eighteen stamps, neatly cut out of the airmail envelopes, lying on his desk in the basement.
As for the letters themselves, they are limp and wrinkled, like old pairs of cotillion gloves. They are skinny as feathers, and light, and Jenny Rose receives them indifferently. They disappear, and when the R.M. or Mr. Harmon asks, “How are your parents doing?” Jenny Rose says, “They’re fine,” and that’s that.
October 10th, 1970
Darling Jenny,
We have been staying in Ubud for three weeks now, visiting Nyoman’s church. Every night as we fall asleep the lizards tick off the minutes like pocket watches, and every morning Nyoman brings us pancakes with honey. Do you remember Nyoman? Do you remember the lizards, the length of your pinky? They are green and never blink, watching us watching them.
Nyoman asks how you are doing, so far away. He and his wife are having their second baby. They have asked us to be their child’s godparents, and to pick the baptismal name. Would you like the baby to have your name, Rose, if it is a girl?
It is sticky here, and we go for walks in the Monkey Forest, where the old woman sits with her bunches of bananas and her broom, swatting the monkeys away. Do you remember how they scream and fly up into the trees?
Aunt Molly wrote that you are quiet as a mouse, and I don’t blame you, in that noisy family!
Love you,
Mom and Dad
Hildy knocks on the door of her mother’s study. When she opens the door, she can see a cigarette, hastily stubbed out, still smoldering in the ashtray. “It’s only my second,” the R.M. says automatically.
Hildy shrugs. “I don’t care what you do,” she says. “I wanted to know if you’d take me to the library. I already asked Jenny Rose – she doesn’t need to go.”
The R.M.‘s face is momentarily blank. Then she frowns and taps another cigarette out of the pack.
“Three,” she says. “I promise that’s it, okay? She’s so quiet, it’s easy to forget she’s here. Except for the wet sheets. I must be the worst guardian in the world – I got a call from one of Jenny Rose’s teachers yesterday, and when I put down the phone, it flew straight out of my head. She hasn’t turned in her assignments recently, and they’re worried that the work might be too much for her. Does she seem unhappy to you?”
Hildy shrugs. “I don’t know, I guess so. She never says anything.”
“I keep forgetting to write and ask your aunt and uncle if she wet the bed before,” the R.M. says. She waves her cigarette and a piece of ash floats down onto her desk. “Has Jenny Rose made any friends at school, besides you and Myron?”
Hildy shrugs again. She is mildly jealous, having to share her absent-minded mother with Jenny Rose. “No, I mean I’m not sure she wants any friends. Mostly she likes to be alone. Can you take me to the library?”
“Sweetie,” her mother says. “I would, but I have to finish the sermon for tomorrow. Ask your dad when he gets home.”
“OK,” Hildy says. She turns to leave.
“Will you keep an eye on your cousin?” the R.M. says, “I mean, on Jenny Rose? I’m a little concerned.”
“OK,” Hildy says again. “When is Dad coming home?”
“He should be here for dinner,” her mother says. But Mr. Harmon doesn’t come home for dinner. He doesn’t come home until Hildy is already in bed, hours after the library has closed.
She lies in bed and listens to her mother shout at him. She wonders if Jenny Rose is awake too.
So Hildy and Myron are watching Jenny Rose again, as she lies on her bed. They scoot their bare feet along the warm, dusty plank floor of the gazebo, taking turns peering through the binoculars.
“She hasn’t been turning in her homework?” Myron asks. “Then what does she do all the time?”
“That’s why we’re watching her,” Hildy says. “To find out.”
Myron lifts the binoculars. “Well, she’s lying on her bed. And she’s flipping the light switch on and off.”
They sit in silence for a while.
“Give me the binoculars,” Hildy demands. “How can she be turning off the light if she’s lying on the bed?”
But she is. The room is empty, except for Jenny Rose, who lies like a stone upon her flowered bedspread, her arms straight at her side. There are three oranges in the bowl beside the bed. The light flashes on and off, on and off. Myron and Hildy sit in the gazebo, the bared twigs of the oak tree scratching above their heads.
Myron stands up. “I have to go home,” he says.
“You’re afraid!” Hildy says. Her own arms are covered in goose pimples, but she glares at him anyway.
He shivers. “Your cousin is creepy.” Then he says, “At least I don’t have to share a room with her.”
Hildy isn’t afraid of Jenny Rose. She tells herself this over and over again. How can she be afraid of someone who still wets the bed?
It seems to Hildy that her parents fight more and more.
Their fights begin over James mostly, who refuses to apply to college. The R.M. is afraid that he will pick a low lottery number, or even volunteer, to spite his family. Mr. Harmon thinks that the war will be over soon, and James himself is closemouthed and noncommittal.
Hildy is watching the news down in the basement. The newscaster is listing names, and dates, and places that Hildy has never heard of. It seems to Hildy that the look on his face is familiar. He holds his hands open and empty on the desk in front of him, and his face is carefully blank, like Jenny Rose’s face. The newscaster looks as if he wishes he were somewhere else.
Hildy’s mother sits on the couch beside her, smoking. When Mr. Harmon comes downstairs, her nostrils flare but she doesn’t say anything.
“Do Jenny Rose’s parents miss her?” Hildy asks.
Her father stands behind her, tweaks her ear. “What made you think of that?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know, I just wondered why they didn’t take her with them.”
The R.M. expels a perfect smoke ring at the TV set. “I don’t know why they went back at all,” she says shortly. “After what happened, your uncle felt that Jenny Rose shouldn’t go back. They spent a week in a five-by-five jail cell with seven other missionaries, and Jenny Rose woke up screaming every night for two years afterwards. I don’t know why he wanted to go back at all, but then I guess in the long run, it wasn’t his child or his wife he was thinking about.”
She looks over Hildy’s head at her husband. “Was it?” she says.
November 26, 1970
Darling Jenny,
We passed a pleasant Thanksgiving, thinking of you in America, and making a pilgrimage ourselves. We are traveling across the islands now, to Flores, where the villagers have rarely heard a sermon, rarely even met people so pale and odd as ourselves.
We took a ferry from Bali to Lombok, where the fishermen hang glass lanterns from their boats at night. The lantern light reflects off the water and the fish lose direction and swim upwards towards the glow and the nets. It occurred to your fa
ther that there is a sermon in this, what do you think?
From the shore you can see the fleet of boats, moving back and forth like tiny needles sewing up the sea. We rode in one, the water an impossible green beneath us. From Lombok we took the ferry to Sumbawa, and your father was badly seasick. We made a friend on the ferry, a student coming home from the university in Java.
The three of us took the bus from one end of the island to Sumbawa at the other end, and as we passed through the villages, children would run alongside the bus, waving and calling out “Orang bulan bulan!”
We arrived on Flores this morning, and are thinking of you, so far away.
Love,
Mom and Dad
Hildy keeps an eye on Jenny Rose. She promised her mother she would. It isn’t spying anymore. It seems to her that Jenny Rose is slowly disappearing. Even her presences, at dinners, in class, are not truly presences. The chair where she sits at the dinner table is like the space at the back of the mouth, where a tooth has been removed, where the feeling of possessing a tooth still lingers. In class, the teachers never call on Jenny Rose.
Only when Hildy looks through the binoculars, watching her cousin turn the bedroom light on and off without lifting a hand, does Jenny Rose seem solid. She is training her eyes to see Jenny Rose. Soon Hildy will be the only person who can see her.
No one else sees the way Jenny Rose’s clothes have grown too big, the way she is sealing up her eyes, her lips, her face, like a person shutting the door of a house to which they will not return. No one else seems to see Jenny Rose at all.
The R.M. worries about James, and Mr. Harmon worries about the news; they fight busily in their spare time, and who knows what James worries about? His bedroom door is always shut and his clothes have the sweet-sour reek of marijuana, a smell that Hildy recognizes from the far end of the school yard.
Jenny Rose doesn’t wet the bed anymore. At nine-thirty, she goes to the bathroom and then climbs into bed and waits for Hildy to turn out the light. Which is pretty silly, Hildy thinks, considering how Jenny Rose spends her afternoons. As she walks back to her bed in the darkness, she thinks of Jenny Rose lying on her bed, eyes open, mouth closed, like a dead person, and she thinks she would scream if the lights came back on. She refuses to be afraid of Jenny Rose. She wonders if her aunt and uncle are afraid of Jenny Rose.
This is a trick that her father taught her in the blackness of the prison cell, when she cried and cried and asked for light. He said, close your eyes and think about something good. From before. (What? she said.)
Are your eyes closed? (Yes.) Good. Now do you remember when we spent the night on the Dieng Plateau? (Yes.) It was cold, and when we walked outside, it was night and we were in the darkness, and the stars were there. Think about the stars.
(Light.)
In this darkness, like that other darkness which was full of the breathing of other people, she remembers the stars. There was no moon, and in the utter darkness the stars were like windows, hard bits of glass and glitter where the light poured through. What she remembers is not how far away they seemed, but how different they were from any other stars she had seen before, so bright-burning and close.
(Darkness.)
Do you remember the Southern Cross? (Yes.) Do you remember the birds? (Yes.) She had walked between her father and mother, passing under the bo trees, looking always upward at the stars. And the bo trees had risen upward, in a great beating of wings, nested birds waking and rising as she walked past. The sound of the breathing of the cell around her became the beautiful sound of the wings.
(Light.)
Do you remember the four hundred stone Buddhas of Borobodur, the seventy-two Buddhas that were calm within their bells, their cages? (Yes.) Be calm, Jenny Rose, my darling, be calm.
(Darkness.)
Do you remember the guard that gave you bubur ayam? (Yes.) Do you remember Nyoman? (Yes.) Do you remember us, Jenny Rose, remember us.
(Light.)
“What are you doing?” James says, coming upon Hildy in the gazebo.
She puts down the binoculars, and shrugs elaborately. “Just looking at things.”
James’s eyes narrow. “You better not be spying on me, you little brat.” He twists the flesh of her arm above the elbow, hard enough to leave a bruise.
“Why would I want to watch you?” Hildy yells at him. “You’re the most boring person I know! You’re more boring than she is.”
She means Jenny Rose, but James doesn’t understand. “You must be the most hopeless spy in the world, you little bitch. You wouldn’t even notice the end of the world. She’s going to kick him out of the house soon, and you probably won’t even notice that.”
“What?” Hildy says, stunned, but James stalks off. She doesn’t understand what James just said, but she knows that marijuana affects the brains of the people who use it. Poor James.
The lights in her bedroom flick on and off, on and off.
Light, darkness, light.
Myron and Hildy are in the basement. In between studying for biology, and cutting out articles for current events, they play desultory Ping-Pong. “Is your cousin a mutant?” Myron says. “Or is she just a mute ant?”
Hildy serves. “She can talk fine, she just doesn’t want to.”
“Huh. Just like she doesn’t bother to turn the lights on and off the way normal people do.” He misses again.
“She’s not that bad,” Hildy says.
“Yeah, sure. That’s why we spy on her all the time. I bet she’s really a communist spy and that’s why you have to keep an eye on her, spying on a spy. I bet her parents are spies, too.”
“She’s not a spy!” Hildy yells, and hits the ball so hard that it bounces off the wall. It’s moving much faster than it should. It whizzes straight for the back of Myron’s head, veering off at the last minute to smash into one of the spider plants.
The macrame plant holder swings faster and faster, loops up and drops like a bomb on the carpet. Untouched, the other macramЋ plant holders explode like tiny bombs, spilling dirt, spider plants, old Ping-Pong balls all over the basement floor.
Hildy looks over and sees Jenny Rose standing on the bottom step. She’s come down the stairs as silently as a cat. Myron sees her too. She’s holding a postage stamp in her hand. “I’m sorry,” Myron says, his eyes wide and scared. “I didn’t mean it.”
Jenny Rose turns and walks up the stairs, still clutching the postage stamp. Her feet on the stairs make no sound and her legs are as white and thin as two ghosts.
Hildy collects lipsticks. She has two that her mother gave her, and a third that she found under the seat of her father’s car. One is a waxy red, so red that Hildy thinks it might taste like a candy apple. One is pink, and the one that she found in the car is so dark that when she puts it on, her mouth looks like a small fat plum. She practices saying sexy words, studying her reflection in the bathroom mirror, her mouth a glossy, bright O. Oh darling, she says. You’re the handsomest, you’re the funniest, you’re the smartest man I know. Give me a kiss, my darling.
She wants to tell Jenny Rose that if she – if Jenny Rose – wore lipstick, maybe people would notice her. Maybe people would fall in love with her, just as they will fall in love with Hildy. Hildy kisses her reflection; the mirror is smooth and cool as water. She keeps her eyes open, and she sees the mirror face, yearning and as close to her own face as possible, the slick cheek pressed against her own warm cheek.
In the mirror, she looks like Jenny Rose. Or maybe she has watched Jenny Rose for too long, and now Jenny Rose is all she can see. She leans her forehead against the mirror, suddenly dizzy.
Myron won’t come over to the Harmons’ house anymore. He goes to the Y instead, plays basketball, until his mother comes to pick him up. He avoids Hildy at school, and finally Hildy calls and explains that she needs him, that it’s an emergency.
They meet in the gazebo, of course. Myron won’t go inside the house, he says, even to pee.
“How
are things?” Myron says.
“Fine,” Hildy says. They are formal as two ambassadors.
“I’m sorry I called your cousin a communist.”
“That’s okay. Look,” Hildy says. She presses the heel of her Ked against a loose board until the other end pops up. In the hollow there is a stack of white envelopes with square holes where the stamps have been cut out. She picks up the top one, dated July 19, 1970. “It’s her secret place. These are her letters.”
“I hope you didn’t read them,” Myron says. He sounds prim, as if he thinks they shouldn’t read other people’s letters, not even letters from spies.
“Of course I did,” she tells him. “And she’s not a spy. She just misses her parents.”
“Oh. Is that all?” he asks sarcastically.
Hildy remembers the cool surface of the mirror, the way it almost gave way against her forehead, like water. “She wants to go home. She’s going to disappear herself. She’s been practicing with the light switch, moving it up and down. She’s going to disappear herself back to Indonesia and her parents.”
“You’re kidding,” he says, but Hildy is sure. She knows this as plainly as if Jenny Rose had told her. The letters are a history of disappearance, reappearance, of travelling. It is what they don’t say that is important.
“Her parents always tell her how much they love her, they tell her the things that they’ve seen and done, and they ask her to be happy. But they never tell her they miss her, that they wish she was with them.”
“I wouldn’t miss her,” Myron says, interrupting. Hildy ignores him.
“They don’t tell her they miss her, because they know that she would come to them. She’s the most stubborn person I know. She’s still waiting for them to say it, to say she can come home.”
“You’re getting as weird as she is,” Myron says. “Why are you telling me all this?”
Hildy doesn’t say, Because you’re my best friend. She says, “Because you have terrible handwriting. You write like an adult.”
“So what?”