Monstress

by Lysley Tenorio

  I stand the flashlight on its end. The whole box glows. I take a red crayon to draw a picture of Isa’s night out, but I’m not sure what’s beyond Lemoore, maybe lit-up cities with high-rising buildings, strangers who wave and say Welcome, and tell you their names. So, instead of Isa’s story, I start drawing ours instead: with a blue crayon I make a circle for our cul-de-sac, and inside it I draw five people in a row, tallest to shortest. Then I surround the circle with stars, and I decide our cul-de-sac is the whole world itself, our bodies so big we fill it, as if we are everywhere at once.

  There is a line of morning light beneath the garage door when I open my eyes, just enough to help me find my way into the house.

  Isa didn’t wake me. Maybe she forgot. I go to her bedroom door. I whisper her name and wait for her to whisper mine, so we both know we’re here. But there’s only silence, and the outside knob is still locked, so I unlock it and step inside. Her bed is still made.

  She’s not hiding in the closet or under the bed. She’s not in the living room, or the kitchen, or the bathroom, and now I’m thinking that I’ve messed up, that she’s on her way home, and I came back too soon. Everyone still sleeps, and I don’t know what to do. I climb on top of her bed, wait for her all over again.

  I wake the second time to shouting and panic, to my father’s face in mine. My mother is behind him, and Darwin is in the hallway, shivering with fever. “What happened last night? What have you done?” My father is shaking me, harder and harder. “Where is your sister?” But I have nothing to tell. All I prepared for was Isa’s return, so I wait for it, refusing to speak, even if he hits me.

  The answers come, later that night, when Isa calls from a pay phone in a place she won’t name, to tell us she’s not coming back, that she’s sorry but happier this way, that she is with Malcolm and she is in love. I’m listening to this on the telephone in my parents’ room, my hand cupped over the receiver so they won’t know I’m here.

  Isa is gone, and now the house feels too small. No matter where I go, I can hear my parents fight, shouting things I shouldn’t know—that my mother never wanted to leave, that my father wishes he was alone in America, free of the worries we cause. “Our plan,” she says one night. “Is this what we planned for?” My father doesn’t answer. He just stands there, jangling his car keys in his pocket, as if he could leave at any moment.

  Darwin never mentions Isa, but once I catch him bouncing his basketball outside Isa’s window, staring in. When he sees me, he pops me with the ball so hard that I fall backwards to the ground. He walks off, and when I breathe, I hurt.

  Isa doesn’t call again. We go for help, but the Navy can do nothing. Neither can the police. She’s gone, not missing, is what they tell us. I don’t know the difference.

  We do what we can. One morning, my mother and I go door-to-door through the neighborhood looking for her, but she makes me do the talking. “Did you see my sister?” I’ll ask a neighbor, then hold up a picture of Isa on her sixteenth birthday. Sometimes I catch my mother peering into their living rooms, her head turning slowly from side to side, like she is trying to learn how other people live. No one has seen Isa, but we go house to house with her picture the next day and the day after, and people start to know who we are.

  My father searches at night. Once, he lets me go with him. I sit in the back, kneeling on the seat with my chin on the headrest, looking out the rear window. We drive for what feels like hours, up and down the same streets over and over, until finally we are outside of town on a long, two-lane road. Suddenly he pulls to the side, and when I turn my father is leaning back, his hands still on the wheel. “I don’t know where we are,” he says to himself. But I do, only now the fog is gone, the gray stalks are green and sprouting corn, and behind us is a row of palm trees, almost as tall as the ones back home.

  Sooner or later, we stop searching. I don’t know when, I don’t know why, but my parents decide that we must learn to live this way, and one night at dinner, I find only four settings on the table. “If she wants us, she’ll call,” my father says, scooping rice onto his plate. And, just like that, things go back to normal: my father sleeps early again to rest for the next day’s work, my mother cooks and cleans, Darwin plays basketball and rides bikes with his friends. The busier we stay, the less my parents fight, the less Darwin bullies me, and soon, school begins again. I’m a third grader now, learning things all the time: that our final states are Alaska and Hawaii, that anything times zero equals zero. One morning I wake up and my mother tells me, “You’re nine years old today.”

  Days feel fuller than they ever were, and after dinner, when everyone is tired and almost ready for bed, we gather in the living room, in front of the new TV. It’s color but still secondhand, and one night half the picture comes in lines so wavy that they almost hurt my eyes. So I look away toward the window, remembering myself on the other side of the glass, the way I watched my family as they are now: nonmoving and silent, their faces blank and glowing blue from the TV screen. We couldn’t be truly happy, but somehow everyone rests easy, as if the fact that we are four instead of five is simply a number, and not a tragedy. No one even cries, and I can’t understand why.

  I put my head on my knees, close my eyes. Somewhere, Isa is fine without us; here, we are fine without Isa. And this is the truth I don’t want to know: that the ones who leave and the ones who get left keep living their lives, whatever the distance between. But not me. When I was outside in the night, I watched my family; I knew they were fine. When she thought she was alone, I watched Isa; I listened to her pray. For the rest of my life, I would be like this. It’s the difference, I think, between all of them and me; even when I was gone, I was here.

  In the last hours of the school day, during filmstrips about good hygiene, our forefathers, and California history, I daydream of Isa: she zooms down a highway edged with cornfields that become skyscrapers, her face framed in the passenger window of Malcolm’s van. Wherever she goes, strangers bid her hello, and I think of her thinking of us: that we’re stuck here forever, that we will never know a bigger world.

  After school, walking home, I daydream again, always of reunion: I’m at the end of our block when I see her, standing at the bottom of the driveway. At first she can’t see me in the fog, but then I emerge from it, and now I’m running to her and she’s running to me.

  It never happens this way.

  In December, on the last day of school before winter vacation, I’ve just walked in the door when my father calls out from the kitchen. “Come here,” he says, and before I can ask why he’s home so early, I see Isa sitting in her chair at the table. Her eyes are pink from crying, her lips are pressed together like she’s keeping a secret. “Hug your sister,” my mother says, so I move closer to Isa, who stares at her lap and whispers “Sorry,” over and over. Her face seems wider now, heavier, and one thick strand of hair crosses her forehead and trails down her shoulder to her elbow. I rub it between my fingers, wondering how long it took to grow, and I think I might understand the way time works: how its passing is impossible to see, but when it’s gone, you feel it. “You should cut this,” I say. Then I do as I’m told and embrace my sister, and that’s when I see it: the dome of her belly, bigger than it was the last time we held each other.

  This is Isa’s story: Malcolm got her pregnant. He didn’t want the baby, and then he didn’t want her. He paid for a bus ticket from wherever they were to Lemoore, and sent Isa on her way. That’s all she told my parents; I never knew more than that. “But you shamed us,” my father tells her in a voice so soft he sounds like he’s speaking to the dead. “You shamed yourself. And if he shows up at my door—”

  “He won’t,” Isa says, and she’s right: I never see Malcolm again and he never calls, but now a baby is inside my sister. I think of its curled-up and freckled body, and wonder what will happen when it’s born. Do I feed it when it’s hungry? Hold it when it cries? No one talks about it, prepares me for it. This baby is like being in Amer
ica—a thing that just happens, a thing you learn to live with.

  My mother is proof of this. One afternoon I’m lying on my bedroom floor staring at the ceiling when I hear her humming. I run to her room, find her laying out baby clothes, their tiny sleeves and pant legs splayed out like X ’s across her bed. “You wore these once,” she says, then holds the smallest shirt I have ever seen against my chest. “Now look. How big you are.” She breathes deeply, sits on the edge of her bed, puts her fingers on my cheek.

  “Isa left us,” I tell her, in case she forgot.

  I haven’t hugged or kissed Isa since she’s been back. Whole days pass and I won’t even say hello. She is the same way, and she joins us only at the dinner table, where all she does is stare at some spot on the table or the wall. Once, her stare is so long and steady she barely blinks, barely breathes, and I get suspicious: maybe she misses wherever she was, and is planning to leave us again.

  I slam my hand on the table to bring her back. The forks and spoons rattle on our plates.

  “Are you brain-damaged?” Darwin says, and when he kicks me hard under the table, I don’t even flinch.

  Days before Christmas, at the start of each night, the neighborhood houses glow and blink with colored lights, but ours is dim and plain. “They don’t have Christmas trees back home,” my father says one morning. “Maybe we should get one?”

  They shop for a tree that afternoon, and as they pull out of the driveway I go running to my father’s window. “I’ll watch Isa,” I say. But he barely nods, like he knows I’ll fail again.

  After they leave, Darwin goes outside to shoot baskets, and I sit in the dark hallway, on the floor in front of Isa’s open door. She hasn’t felt well all day, so she lies on her bed, facing the wall. But we are alone in the house, just Isa and me, and now is the time for all my questions—where she was all those months and the things she did; if she dreamed of me as often as I dreamed of her; and did she plan, from the very beginning, to leave us, knowing that I would wait for her, inside a box?

  “You were gone” is the first thing I say.

  She nods her head.

  “When you left, nobody talked to me. For a long time. Even though I was here.” I stare at the carpet, dig my finger into it. “We drove at night to find you. We couldn’t.” Outside, Darwin’s basketball thumps and thumps, and I dig my finger deeper and deeper. “I walk by myself now. All the way to school. All the way home.” When Isa turns to face me, I realize I’m crying, but I keep going, telling her more she doesn’t know about me: new words I’ve learned in school, the teeth I’ve lost, how now I’m nine years old and can finally say very the way you’re supposed to, but despite all these facts I always end up saying the same thing: “You were gone.”

  “But I’m back,” she says, trying to smile. “I’m here.” She takes a deep breath, sits up, rubbing her sides like the baby takes up too much room inside her. Slowly, she gets to her feet, reaches into her dresser, and from beneath folded dresses she takes out a cigarette and a book of matches. She lights it, breathes deeply, and a ring of smoke floats toward me. “Remember how much you liked these? How they made you laugh?” She breathes and breathes, and more rings float my way, but I let them fade.

  She doesn’t give up. She takes the cigarette to her lips, takes a long, deep breath, but instead of smoke rings all that comes out is a cough. She tries once more but coughs again, like she’s forgotten how to smoke. She stubs out the cigarette against the window screen, sets the butt on the sill, and now she hunches over, holding her belly as though it’s suddenly heavier than it was before. “I don’t feel right,” she says, squinting with pain. She steps toward the bed, sits but misses the edge, falls to the floor. She looks funny and I almost laugh, but then I hear her say, “It hurts,” and when she looks down between her legs, spots of blood are on her pink pajama bottoms. She puts her hand there, then looks at the blood on her fingers. “Something’s wrong,” she says. She tries to stand, but she hurts too much to move.

  I get up, step into her room, reach for the box of tissues on her dresser and try handing it to her. But she pushes it away and asks for our mother, our father, then says she should get to a hospital, and now I think this baby will be born now, here. But I’m not ready. I don’t want to be.

  I pull out a tissue and lay it down by her hand. I tell her I’ll get Darwin, that he will know what to do. “Just wait here, okay?” I close the door, tell her not to leave, and then, in case she tries to, I lock it.

  I take a step back and listen to her shouting my name. Then the doorknob rattles, and I imagine what my mother feared: a stranger on the other side, trying to break in. “Just wait,” I say again, then run to the end of the hallway. “I’ll be back.” Behind me, I can hear Isa’s hand slapping softly against the door.

  I head to the living room and walk out of the house. I go down the driveway past Darwin, who keeps bouncing his basketball against the garage door. “Where are you going?” he says, but I keep walking, even when he tells me to stay.

  I continue down the sidewalk, count eleven houses. When I reach the end, I cross the street, and at the next house a lady is in the front window, holding a teacup in her hand. She sees me standing at the bottom of her driveway, but instead of drawing the curtain or looking away, she just waves, takes a sip of her drink. I don’t wave back or even smile, but I nod to let her know I see her.

  Then I turn back toward my street. Night is starting, but the air is warm, all the rooftops blink with colored lights, and Christmas trees full of ornaments and silvery tinsel light up every living room window. Soon, our house will be this way too.

  This is what L’amour was meant to be. This is the place my sister called home. Finally, after a long, long year, we’re here. And so I go back, walking first, then running fast because I can’t wait to ask her, Isa, how are you? Isa, how have you been?

  Acknowledgments

  For the gifts of time, financial support, and community during the writing of this book, I’m grateful to the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University, the University of Oregon Creative Writing Program, the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy, the James McCreight Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the John Steinbeck Fellowship at San Jose State University, Saint Mary’s College of California (especially the Department of English, the MFA Program in Creative Writing, and the Faculty Development Committee), the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation.

  Thanks to Ira Silverberg, for keeping faith in my work, and to Ruth Curry and Dwight Curtis, who helped take care of it. C. Michael Curtis and Maria Streshinsky at The Atlantic, Michael Ray at Zoetrope: All-Story, Frank Stewart and Leigh Saffold at Manoa, and Don Lee and Gish Jen at Ploughshares kindly published these stories, and the good people at Ecco/HarperCollins, especially Lee Boudreaux, my truly excellent editor, and Abigail Holstein, turned them into a book. Thank you all.

  To the friends who read these stories when they were barely readable—Otis Haschemeyer, Jack Livings, Katharine Noel, Tamara Guirado, Julie Orringer, Adam Johnson, ZZ Packer, Edward Schwarzschild, Angela Pneuman, Tom Kealey, Tom McNeely, James Pearson, Cai Emmons, Paige Newman, Natasha Garber, Melanie Conroy-Goldman, Rosemary Graham, and Anthony Doerr—I owe you all a drink.

  For their wisdom and generosity, I’m grateful to my teachers Chang-rae Lee, Peter Ho Davies, Rebecca Stowe, Tobias Wolff, John L’Heureux, Elizabeth Tallent, and Bharati Mukherjee.

  Thanks to Tara Runyan, who read from the beginning, and to Serena Crawford, who read to the end.

  And to Bruce, who arrived just in time.

  Finally, my gratitude and love to my family: my nieces and nephews, who make me laugh; my brothers and sisters (all eight), who work harder than anyone I know; and my mom and dad, who brought us home.

  Praise for Monstress
r />   “What I love about Tenorio’s stories is the absence of nudge-nudge-wink-wink faux-irony that imbues so much contemporary fiction writing grounded in pop culture. The films of Ed Wood echo in the title story, and—in other stories—the Green Lantern and the Beatles and psychic surgery charlatanism and the grotesque circus of Jerry-Springeresque talk shows. But these are the backdrops for dramas that are profoundly human and humane. Outsiders and oddballs, outcasts and rejects—all are brought to vivid and affecting life in these stories. Tenorio never condescends, never goes for the easy joke or punch line. Tenorio’s wit is understated; his writing is deft and self-assured; his dramas don’t shout, but whisper, seductive and heartfelt. Monstress is one of the wisest and [most] heartfelt collections I’ve read. I’ve waited a long time for this book. To quote one of Tenorio’s own characters: ‘Jackpot—Eureka! This is the real deal.’”

  —Daniel Orozco, author of Orientation and Other Stories

  “In these fantastic stories, Tenorio skillfully blends the unlikely and the emotional, the bizarre and the humane. His writing portrays the universal human condition through unique specificity, and is very deserving of attention.”

  —Rishi Reddi, author of Karma and Other Stories

  “Monstress is an exhilarating rollercoaster of a book. Deeply funny, heartbreaking, hopeful, philosophical, bawdy, and wise, Tenorio’s stories, written from the underbelly of the American Dream, present one brilliant portrait after another.”

  —Sabina Murray, PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author of The Caprices and Tales of the New World

  About the Author