by Kelly Link
“I want you to help me steal her next letter. I want you to write like them, write that she can go home now. I can’t do it. What if she recognized my handwriting?”
“You want me to get rid of her for you?” Myron says.
“I think that if she doesn’t go home soon, she’ll get sick. She might even die. She never eats anything anymore.”
“So call the doctor.” Myron says, “No way. I can’t help you.”
But in the end he does. It is December, and the R.M. has canceled two conferences with Jenny Rose’s teachers, busy with her church duties. It doesn’t really matter. The teachers don’t notice Jenny Rose; they call on other students, check off her name at attendance without looking to see her. Hildy watches Jenny Rose, she looks away to see Myron watching her. He passes her a note in class on Tuesday. I can’t keep my eyes on her. How can you stand it? Hildy can barely decipher his handwriting, but she knows Jenny Rose will be able to read it. Jenny Rose can do anything.
This morning the R.M. almost walked right into Jenny Rose. Hildy was sitting at the breakfast table, eating cereal. She saw the whole thing. Jenny Rose opened the refrigerator door, picked out an orange, and then as she left the kitchen, the R.M. swerved into the room around her, as if Jenny Rose were an inconveniently placed piece of furniture.
“Mom,” Hildy said. The R.M. picked up Hildy’s cereal bowl to wash it, before Hildy was finished.
“What?” the R.M. said.
“I want to talk to you about Jenny Rose.”
“Your cousin?” said the R.M. “It was nice having her stay with us, wasn’t it?”
“Never mind,” Hildy said. She went to get ready for school.
The three of them sit in the boat. The water is green, the boat is green, she is surprised sometimes when she opens her eyes, that her skin isn’t green. Sometimes she is worried because her parents aren’t there. Sometimes there is another girl in the boat, bigger than her, always scowling. She wants to tell this girl not to scowl, but it’s better to ignore her, to concentrate on putting her parents back in the boat. Go away, she tells the girl silently, but that isn’t right. She’s the one who has to go away. What is the girl’s name? The girl refuses to sit still, she stands up and waves her arms and jumps around and can’t even see that she is in danger of falling into the water.
Go away, she thinks at the girl, I’m busy. I blew the roof off a prison once, I knocked the walls down, so I could look at the stars. Why can’t I make you go away? I can walk on water, can you? When I leave, I’m taking the boat with me, and then where will you be, silly girl?
Hildy loves her mother’s preaching voice, so strong and bell-clear. The R.M. and Hildy’s father fight all the time now; the R.M. stays in the kitchen until late at night, holding conversations in a whisper with Mercy Orzibal, Myron’s mother, over the phone. Hildy can’t hear what the R.M. is saying when she whispers, but she’s discovered that if she stands very quietly, just inside the kitchen door, she can make herself as invisible as Jenny Rose. It is just like hiding under the Ping-Pong table. No one can see her.
At night, when the R.M. screams at her husband, Hildy covers her ears with her hands. She sticks the pillow over her head. Lately Hildy never loses at Ping-Pong, although she tries to let her father win. The skin under her father’s eyes is baggy and too pink. Next week, he is going away to a conference on American literature.
The R.M. stands straight as a pin behind the pulpit, but this is what Hildy remembers: her mother sitting curled on the kitchen floor, the night before, cupping the phone to her ear, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Hildy waited for her mother to see her, standing in the doorway. The R.M. slammed the phone down on the hook. That bitch, she said, and sat sucking smoke in and looking at nothing at all.
Hildy’s father sits with the choir, listening attentively to his wife’s sermon. This is what Hildy remembers: at dinner, the spoon trembling in his hand as he lifted it to his mouth, his wife watching him. Hildy looked at her father, then at her mother, then at Jenny Rose who never seems to look at anything, whom no one else sees, except Hildy.
It is easier now, looking at Jenny Rose; Hildy finds it hard to look at anyone else for very long. Jenny Rose sits beside her on the wooden pew bench, her leg touching Hildy’s leg. Hildy knows that Jenny Rose is only holding herself upon the bench by great effort. It is like sitting beside a struck match that waits and refuses to ignite. Hildy knows that Jenny Rose is so strong now that if she wanted, she could raise the roof, turn the communion grape juice into wine, walk on water. How can the R.M. not see this, looking down from the pulpit at Hildy, her eyes never focusing on her niece, as if Jenny Rose has already gone? As if Jenny Rose was never there?
Even with her eyes closed for the benediction, Hildy can still see Jenny Rose. Jenny Rose’s eyes remain open, her hands are cupped and expectant: her leg trembles against Hildy’s leg. Or maybe it is Hildy’s leg that trembles, beneath the weight of her mother’s voice, her father’s terrible, pleading smile. For a moment she longs to be as invisible as Jenny Rose, to be such a traveler.
When the mail comes on Monday, there is a letter from Jenny Rose’s parents. Hildy extracts the letter from the pile. Myron watches, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He is not happy about being in the same house as Jenny Rose.
All weekend Myron has been practicing two short phrases, with the aid of one of the original letters. Hildy steams open the letter over the teakettle, while Myron watches. The light in Hildy’s bedroom flicks on, flicks off, flicks on again. Hildy can feel it pulling at her: for a moment, she feels as if she were tumbling down the spout, falling into the kettle. She might drown in the kettle water. It’s that deep. She’s gotten too small. She shakes her head, takes a breath.
They take the letter down to the basement, and sit under the Ping-Pong table while Hildy quickly scans it. Myron, who has gone to the trouble of collecting an assortment of pens, adds a postscript in black ballpoint. We miss you so much, darling Jenny. Please, please come home.
“It doesn’t match,” Myron says, handing the letter to Hildy. She folds it back into the envelope and glues the envelope shut again. It really doesn’t matter: Jenny Rose is ready to go. Hildy realizes that she wasn’t worried Jenny Rose would recognize her handwriting, it wasn’t because of that – Hildy just wants a witness, someone who will see what she has done, what Jenny Rose will do.
“I saw your father,” Myron says. “He was at my house last night.”
“He’s out of town,” Hildy says. “He went to a conference.”
“He stayed all night long,” Myron says. “I know because when I went to school this morning, he was hiding. In my mother’s bedroom.”
“You’re such a liar,” Hildy says. “My father is in Wisconsin. He called us from the hotel. How do you think he got from Wisconsin to your house? Do you think he flew?”
“You think Jenny Rose can fly,” Myron says. His face is very red.
“Get out of my house,” Hildy says. Her hand floats at her side, longing to slap him.
“I think you’re nuts,” Myron says. “Just like her.” And he leaves. His back is stiff with outrage.
Hildy rocks back and forth, sitting under the Ping-Pong table. She holds the letter in her hand as if it were a knife. She thinks about Jenny Rose, and what is going to happen.
Hildy is theatrical enough to want a bang at the end of all her labors. She wants to see Jenny Rose restored to herself. Hildy wants to see the mythical being that she is sure her cousin contains, like a water glass holding a whole ocean. She wants to see Jenny Rose’s eyes flash, hear her voice boom, see her fly up the chimney and disappear like smoke. After all, she owes Hildy something, Hildy who generously divided her room in half, Hildy who has arranged for Jenny Rose to go home.
No one is in the house now. James, two months away from his birthday, has gone to register for the draft. Her father is still in Wisconsin (Myron is such a liar!), and her mother is at the church. So after a while, H
ildy brings the letter to Jenny Rose, gives it to her cousin, who is lying on her bed.
Hildy sits on her own bed and waits while Jenny Rose opens the letter. At first it seems that Hildy has miscalculated, that the postscript is not enough. Jenny Rose sits, her head bent over the letter. She doesn’t move or exclaim or do anything. Jenny Rose just sits and looks down at the letter in her lap.
Then Hildy sees how tightly Jenny Rose holds the letter. Jenny Rose looks up, and her face is beautiful with joy. Her eyes are green and hot. All around Jenny Rose the air is hot and bright. Hildy inhales the air, the buzzing rain and rusted metal smell of her cousin.
Jenny Rose stands up. The air seems to wrap around her like a garment. It sounds like swarms and swarms of invisible bees. Hildy’s hair raises on her scalp. All around them, drawers and cabinets dump their contents on the floor, while Tshirts whoosh up, slapping sleeves against the ceiling. Schoolbooks open and flap around the room like bats, and one by one the three oranges lift out of the blue bowl on the bedside table. They roll through the air, faster and faster, circling around Jenny Rose on her bed. Hildy ducks as tubes of lipstick knock open the bureau drawer, and dart towards her like little chrome-and-tangerine-, flamingo-and-ebony-colored bees. Everything is buzzing, humming, the room is full of bees.
And then -
“I’m making a mess,” Jenny Rose says. She tears the stamp from the envelope, gives it to Hildy. Only their two hands touch, but Hildy falls back on the bed – as if she has stuck her fingers into an electrical outlet – she flies backwards onto her bed.
Jenny Rose walks into the bathroom, and Hildy can see the bathtub full of water, the silly little boat (is that what she wanted?), the green water spilling over the lip of the tub and rushing over Jenny Rose’s feet. Be careful! Hildy thinks. The door slams shut. As Hildy catches her breath, the air in the room becomes thin, and her ears pop. The magic trick is over, the bathroom is empty: Jenny Rose has gone home. Hildy bursts into tears, sits on her bed and waits for her mother to come home. After a while, she begins to pick up her room.
This is the first and most mysterious of three vanishings. No one but Hildy seems to notice that Jenny Rose is gone. A few months later, James goes to Canada. He is dodging the draft. He tells no one he is going, and Hildy finds the brief, impersonal note. He is failing his senior classes, he is afraid, he loves them but they can’t help him. Please take care of his fish.
When Mr. Harmon moves out of the house, Hildy has resigned herself to this, that life is a series of sudden disappearances, leavetakings without the proper goodbyes. Someday she too might vanish. Some days she looks forward to learning this trick.
What sustains her is the thought of the better place in which one arrives. This is the R.M.‘s heaven; the Canada that James has escaped to; it is in the arms of Mercy Orzibal with her bright, glossy mouth, who tells Mr. Harmon how witty, how charming, how handsome he is. It is the green lake in the photograph Jenny Rose has sent Hildy from the island of Flores.
In the photograph Jenny Rose sits between her mother and father, in a funny little white boat with a painted red eye. On the back of the photograph is an enigmatic sentence. There is a smudge that could be a question mark; the punctuation is uncertain. Wish you were here.
Wish you were here?
SURVIVOR’S BALL, OR, THE DONNER PARTY
1. Travel.
They had been traveling together for three days in Jasper’s rented car when they came to the dark mouth of the tunnel into Milford Sound. Serena was telling Jasper something very important. What did Jasper know about Serena after three days? That she didn’t wear underwear. That she was allergic to bees. That she liked to talk. (She said the strangest things.) That she was from Pittsburgh. Listening to her voice made him feel less homesick.
Jasper was driving on the wrong side of the road, in a place where water spun down the wrong way in the drain, on a continent that was on what he thought of as the upside-down part of the globe, where they celebrated Christmas on the beach and it snowed in the summer, which was the winter. A girl from Pittsburgh was a good thing, like an anchor. Every homesick traveler should have one.
“That thing you said to me in the bar was so cute,” Serena said. “You know, when we met?” Jasper said nothing. His tooth hurt. He mimed, to show that it was hurting. “Poor guy,” Serena said.
They drove down the Avenue of the Disappearing Mountain through groves of swordlike cabbage trees. The road circled up between cracked gray boulders and the little red car went up the road like a toy pulled on a string.
“There was a guy in Auckland who had been to Milford Sound,” Serena said. “He told me it was like standing at the edge of the world. It’s funny. I’d met him before, in Tokyo, I think. Once you’ve been traveling for a while, you run into the same people everywhere you go. But I never remember their names. You end up saying things to each other like, ‘Do I know you? Were you the guy at that restaurant, that one with the huge fish tank, in Amsterdam?’ You end up writing down your addresses on little pieces of paper for each other, and then you always lose the pieces of paper, but it’s okay, because you’ll run into each other again.
“It’s not a very big world,” she said sadly.
They had been late leaving the youth hostel in Te Anau because Serena slept past noon, and then she thought she might like a shower. There was no hot water left, but she spent a long time in the bathroom anyway, writing in her journal. Jasper hoped she wasn’t writing about him. He consulted his guidebook and then the hostel manager and still managed to get lost on his way to the corner dairy to buy aspirin for his tooth, and then lost again on the way back. In the end, he had to ask a little girl wearing a red parka and striped black-and-white stockings for directions. When he came back, Serena was sitting on the bed, writing postcards. Her clothes and her books and other things were scattered all around her. She looked completely at home in the hostel room, as if she had lived here for years, but everything went back into her backpack, snip-snap, and then the room looked very empty, nothing but a lonely bed and a heap of sheets.
Before they left Te Anau, they stopped at a pub for lunch. Jasper couldn’t eat, but he paid for Serena’s meal. She flirted with the barman, sticking strands of her hair into her wide red mouth, and licking them into dark, glossy tips. She told the barman that she was running away from home, that she was going to travel all the way around the world and just keep on going, that she liked New Zealand beer. She didn’t say anything at all about Jasper who was standing at the bar right there beside her, but her hand had been curled in a comfortable way in his pocket, down under the counter.
They hadn’t seen a single car since they’d left the main road and headed for the pass into Milford Sound. After enduring ominous weather reports all the way from Queenstown to Te Anau, he guessed it wasn’t surprising. Alone, Jasper would have headed up the east coast to Dunedin, rather than making the long drive into the West and Fiordland, but Serena had a great desire to see Milford Sound and he was quickly learning that Serena was seldom thwarted in her great desires.
Two nights ago he had been sitting in bed, watching her sleep. Dust floated in the cold moonlighted air and he sneezed. A piece of his tooth, a back molar, fell into his hand. In the morning when Serena woke up, she had put it in an airmail envelope, sealed the envelope, and written “Jasper’s tooth” on it.
He had the envelope in his pocket now and every once in a while his tongue went up to touch the changed, broken place in his mouth. “I’ve never met anyone named Jasper before,” Serena said, “It’s old-fashioned.”
Jasper looked at her. She looked back, smirking, black hair tucked into her mouth. She was doodling on the back of her own hand with a fountain pen, making thin jagged lines. It was an expensive pen. His name was engraved on it.
“So’s Serena,” he said carefully, around the tooth. “My grandmother’s youngest brother’s name was Jasper. He died in a war.”
“I’m not named after anybody,” Serena
said. “In fact, I’ve always hated my name. It makes me sound like a lake or something. Lake Serena. Lake Placid. I don’t even like to swim.”
Jasper kept his eyes on the road. “I never learned how to swim,” he said.
“Then hope that there will always be enough lifeboats,” she said, and closed one eye slowly. He watched her in the rear-view mirror. It was not an altogether friendly wink. She put the pen down on the dashboard.
“My grandmother gave me that pen,” he said. He’d lent it to Serena in the bar in Queenstown when they met. She hadn’t given it back yet, although he had bought her a ballpoint at a chemist’s the next day. He’d also bought her a bright red lipstick, which he had thought was funny for some reason, a bar of chocolate, and a tiny plastic dinosaur because she said she didn’t like flowers. He wasn’t really sure what you were supposed to buy for a girl you met in the bar, but she had liked the dinosaur.
“I never had a grandmother,” Serena said, “Not a single one. Not a mother, not a brother, not a sister, not a cousin. In fact, there was a general drought of relatives where I was concerned. A long dry spell. Although once I brought home a kitten, and my father let me keep it for a while. That kitten was the only relative who ever purely loved me. Does your grandmother love you?”
“I guess,” Jasper said. “We have the same ears. That’s what everyone says. But I have my father’s crummy teeth.”
“My father’s dead,” Serena said, “and so is the kitten.”
“I’m sorry,” Jasper said, and Serena shrugged. She held her left hand away from her, examining her drawing. It looked like a map to Jasper – pointy stick-drawings of mountains, and lines for roads. She stuck a finger in her mouth and began to smudge the lines away carefully, one by one. “Your ears aren’t so bad,” she said.
The radio went on and off in a blur of static. Unseasonable weather… party of trekkers on the Milford Track… missing for nearly… between Dumpling and Doughboy Huts… rescue teams… Then nothing but static. Jasper turned off the radio.