Sycamore

by Bryn Chancellor

  Dazed and jittery, Dani walked to her mother’s house, her childhood home. Five, six, she’s gonna slit your wrists, seven, eight, lock the gate. At her mother’s house, she picked up the newspaper from the driveway, climbed the porch steps, and peered in the side window. Like going back in time, except most of the furniture from her first seventeen years was gone, sold or given away or stuffed in the storage unit, all but the refinished dining table and reupholstered blue recliners. Hugh had contributed a large leather sofa, glass-fronted bookcases, and some colorful rugs. Dani braced herself as she cracked the door, forgetting that the Captain wouldn’t come lunging at her.

  She dropped the newspaper and her keys on the kitchen counter and went to the freezer, took a deep breath, and opened the door to a hiss of mist. The compact plastic bag sat on the shelf, right where she’d left it. She reached in and touched the black plastic, but a wave of panic rose in her, and she yanked her arm back. She slammed the door shut.

  Shaking, she sank into the recliner on the right—her father’s. She still thought of it as his, even though he’d been gone for eighteen years now. Since then, in the handful of times she’d seen him, usually when he dropped by unannounced at the holidays, Dani still couldn’t look at him in the face—which was her face, as everyone used to point out (Adam! She looks just like you!): dark hair, blue-gray eyes, pointy chin, although she’d gotten her mother’s straight nose instead of his hawklike one. A face she’d once loved beyond reason. Her funny, handsome Daddy who made her lunches and painted landscapes up in the attic and fixed up her car on weekends. Who gave her books and music as gifts and red-marked her Humanities papers but also made her take breaks and taught her to play card games—poker, pinochle, hearts—and easy sleight-of-hand magic tricks. The one who gave her a map and a pack of thumbtacks and said, “Mark it up, Dani. See the world. You can go anywhere you want. I want you to see as much as you can.” In those days before he left town, she couldn’t look him in the eyes. “Look at me, please, Dani,” he’d said, pleading. “Please let me explain,” but she couldn’t. She plugged her ears and kept her eyes focused to the right of his cheek, on his trimmed sideburn, at the yellow pencil behind his ear. She asked him not to visit her or to ever talk to her about it, and she never visited him. What was done was done. Now she ignored his calls but read his letters, which he sent every couple of weeks or so. In them he recounted his sad life at his cabin in Kachina Village. In each he tucked a check inside, which she cashed once a month and used for rent. Perhaps he saw this as some kind of penance; she didn’t ask. She didn’t write back. She didn’t say thank you.

  She stood and went to the window that overlooked the backyard. The tall cottonwoods and shaggy cat claws and junipers no longer fit her memory. Obscuring the chain-link fence was a row of ocotillo Hugh had planted to keep the Captain from digging out. She looked at a spot near the left corner, where dry grass had attached itself in clumps to the lower diamonds of the chain link.

  She walked down the hall to her old bedroom, which Hugh and her mother had turned into a room for the Captain: a dog bed, food and water, stuffed animals and squeak toys, a small TV they’d left on for him and which she’d shut off the day she found the Captain in the kitchen. She turned it on now. On the screen a blond teenage girl fought a vampire with a misshapen forehead. The girl stuck a stake through it, and it exploded into dust. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The young girl didn’t seem to break a sweat. Dani clicked it off. In the room, her little wood desk was gone, and so was the travel map with its sunny pushpins. Gone was the microscope where she would prick her finger and look at her blood, confounded by the serpentine clumps of cells, thinking then she’d work with blood as a doctor or scientist. Gone were the rickety vintage twin beds, an arm’s length apart, where she and Jess had once rolled around and kicked their bare feet and whispered secrets, where she had snuck Paul Overton in one spring afternoon when her parents were out and lost her virginity. Where she’d wake up in the middle of the night and see the empty bed across from her and wonder, Where’s Jess? before falling asleep, sure Jess was in the bathroom or getting a drink of water. Where she’d later vomited off the side into a trash can, an image of her father and Jess in her head, her mother screaming in the next room. Where she’d lain awake in the dark after all those police interviews in the weeks after Jess disappeared.

  She crossed the hall into the bathroom. The cream tile, that same tile, glowed under the fluorescents. Modern taupe hand towels now, instead of pink, hung on the sink rack. She fiddled with the light switch, flipped it on and off. Dark, light, dark, light. Tiny, tiny, tiny sparks behind her eyes.

  Dani had met Jess late in the spring of junior year, but Dani had seen her and knew who she was, of course. Jess at first had hung around Angie Juarez, riding around in Angie’s old red car, and the boys said, Oh, she’s a big lezbo, too, angry such a pretty girl hadn’t given them the time of day, and the girls said, She’s such a stuck-up bitch. But then Angie went back to being the quietest person in school, grease on her necklines and under her fingernails, and still Jess wanted nothing to do with any of them. Graffiti popped up on lockers: “Jess Winters spreads,” which wasn’t true in the malicious, salacious sense they intended, but the rumor—Jess Winters fucks her best friend’s daddy—didn’t come out until later, anyway.

  Dani hadn’t cared about gossip. She’d barely noticed. Even when Jess started eating lunch in Ms. G’s classroom with her, she hadn’t paid much attention. At first it was because she was too busy being Dani Newell: studying, lost in a world of math and biology and pretests and scholarship applications, immune by then to the eye-rolls and snorts of her classmates. She shut them out; when she walked down the hall, clasping her books, she imagined herself behind protective glass, like the pope, except unlike the pope, she was mentally giving them all the finger. Professor’s Kid and Most Likely to Succeed—goddamn right. But then she started tutoring Paul Overton, who she knew wrote for the school paper and had broken all kinds of records in track and cross-country—not that she’d ever been to a track meet. He understood trig almost as well as she did, but his father had died, and he’d fallen behind. Within weeks, she was so in love with Paul and so busy having sex with him—in her twin bed after he snuck in through the window, or in her car’s back seat, or in his mother’s pecan orchards on a blanket right on the dirt—she hardly noticed anyone else. All she saw those days were Paul’s blue eyes and his black woolly hair; it was as if someone had replaced the lenses of her eyes. She clutched at those big ears of his like she might fall off a cliff if she let go. She didn’t know her body, let alone her heart, could feel like that—unearthly, like a flare in the corona of the sun.

  Then Paul’s mom hired Jess Winters at the orchards. When Dani drove over one afternoon for Paul’s tutoring session, her underwear stuffed in her purse, she found Jess behind the counter, head thrown back in laughter, her long hair brushing her arms. Paul laughed with her, leaning in, as if they were old friends. For a moment, Dani stood puzzled, unsure whether to be annoyed, but then Paul saw her. He turned away from Jess and in one swift movement pulled Dani into a hug, lifting her off the ground, her ballet flats slipping off her heels, her glasses knocked crooked. A breeze snuck up Dani’s skirt and grazed her naked buttocks, the soft damp spot between her thighs, and she’d shivered with the sensation. She, Dani Newell, in the arms of a beautiful boy. Her whole body hummed, softened.

  When Paul set her on the ground, she’d smoothed her skirt down, her cheeks buzzing. Flustered by her emotions, she turned to Jess. She’d babbled something about that idiot cheerleader, and Jess tossed off something tart and smart, making Dani smile. This girl was no idiot.

  Paul took her hand, leading her toward his house behind the office, toward the desk in his bedroom, toward his bed.

  “See you at lunch, then,” Dani had said with a wave. Jess had waved back, her eyes shining like a planet, and Dani squeezed Paul’s hand harder. If she could be a girlfriend, maybe she could be
that, too. A friend.

  And she had been. A friend. A best friend. With Jess, Dani got to try on yet another version of herself, one no one expected of her in that town, a girl who went camping in Mexico, her hair stiff with ocean salt, who wore kohl eyeliner and listened to music with atonal chords. With first Paul and then Jess, Dani felt almost wild, riding shotgun in a pretend life, skirting the edge of danger. She had not expected it of herself, so long had she known the safe, mapped-out direction of her life. She watched that shiny, exquisite version bounce and roll toward her, and she reached out to grab it.

  A ball that turned out to be a hand grenade.

  In the days and months after Paul blurted her father’s secret at dinner, Dani didn’t cry, or wail, or throw fits, or lash out like her mother had. She simply locked all the hot, lovely parts of herself away. She put up the screen of glass again, although this time it thickened into an opaque block of ice. Everything on the other side—her father on his knees, weeping so hard his eyes swelled shut, begging her to forgive him; her mother throwing all his clothes into the street; him driving away in her old car because she’d refused anything he’d touched; the row of solid Fs on her transcript after her first year at college, from 4.0 to 0.0 in a year, when instead of studying or going to class she spent her days huddled in a carrel in the library or riding the bus into San Francisco and wandering the streets she’d once read about; coming home to her old bedroom in this old town; the whispers and glances as she stocked shelves or mopped floors—was recognizable but distant, arctic, tinged blue.

  Dani flipped the bathroom light off and hurried down the hall, pouring herself a whiskey from Hugh’s stash in the cupboard over the stove. She didn’t add ice, unwilling to reach around the Captain in the freezer. She couldn’t even bear to touch the handle. She looked to the side of it, thinking of how she’d looked to the side of Maud’s face as her blood flowed into the vial.

  She sat in the window seat and rested her forehead on the warm glass, peering at the yard in the late afternoon, the shadows long and leggy. She looked to the corner of the yard again. Nine, ten, she’s coming again, one, two, Jess is coming for you.

  Dani drained her whiskey. She went to the freezer, and holding her breath, she pulled the Captain into her arms. Even frozen, he was still as light as a wrapped Christmas toy.

  She stepped into the yard, hazy with the day’s warmth and fading sun, and walked across the dry grass to the far left corner of the lot. She set the frozen dog on the ground and rubbed at her inner arms, the tender place where she prodded and flicked others before jabbing them with a needle. She kneeled and pressed at the plastic bag until she could see the dog’s shape. The air was as warm as a bath, but she began to shiver.

  That last night, Dani had looked up from reading her book at the dining table to see Jess standing on the deck, her hands pressed against the sliding glass door. Jess’s brown curls, soaked from the rain, were pulled straight and stringy, and her mascara and eyeliner streaked under her eyes and down her cheeks. Dani should have been startled, but she wasn’t. She looked up as if she expected to see her there, and there she was. The first thing Dani felt was happy to see her, and she started to smile. Then she remembered.

  She rose and walked to the door, staring at her through the glass. Jess dropped her hands. The roof overhang shielded her from the rain, but her shoulders jumped, her lips trembling. Dani pulled the door open to a frigid gust.

  “Look who it is,” Dani said. “My best friend.” She laughed. “Let me guess. You were in the neighborhood.”

  Jess pushed her hands inside her coat. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  Dani laughed. “Never better. Perfect. A million bucks.”

  Jess reached out and grabbed Dani’s wrist. “I’m so sorry. Please don’t hate me. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”

  Dani yanked her wrist away. “But it did happen. You did it.”

  Jess clawed at the air, got hold of the fabric of Dani’s shirt, and pulled.

  “Please,” she said. “You have to believe me.”

  From behind the blue ice, Dani noted Jess’s chattering teeth, and her first impulse was to pull her inside out of the cold. Instead she tugged her shirt from Jess’s grip. Her knees shook until she remembered to lock them.

  She said, “Stop trying to make me feel sorry for you. God, go home. You look terrible. You need to get out of the rain and get warm.”

  Jess swayed before grabbing the doorframe. “He asked me to go with him. But I said no. I couldn’t.”

  “Go where?”

  “With him.” She looked at her feet. “To his new place.”

  Dani stared at her. “You mean, like live with him?”

  Jess nodded.

  Dani laughed. “Move in with my father. And be, what? My stepmother?”

  “No. I didn’t go. I told him no.” Agitated, Jess unzipped her coat, catching her notebook as it slipped down.

  Dani laughed harder. “How good of you. How moral of you. What a good friend you are.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Jess said.

  “I don’t care what it was like.” Dani stopped laughing and instead started to cry. Hot, fat, salty sobs that burst forth from her tight chest. Which infuriated her. She stepped across the threshold and pushed Jess with both hands, hitting her full force in the ribs. Jess stumbled into one of the wooden chairs but caught herself. Her notebook landed at Dani’s feet.

  The rain stung Dani’s hands and arms and neck as she bent and picked up the book. She swatted it against her palm. “Oh, your precious notebooks. Your precious, precious writing. Did you write about him? Did you write him love poems?”

  “No,” Jess said.

  Dani opened the book and flipped through it, rain spattering the pages, smearing the ink. Her eyes grew blurry again, her throat clenched and raw.

  “Did you write about me? Or my mom?”

  “No,” Jess said.

  “You better not have. You better not ever, ever write about me. I don’t want your words.” She walked to the deck rail, ripped out pages, and threw them into the yard. She tore out more and wadded them up, chucking them into the darkness. She flung the cover after them like a Frisbee.

  She stood there panting and choking out sobs, her clothes and hair soaked, as she stared at the crumpled paper scattered across the grass. The wall of ice was gone, melted, leaving her with this terrible crying, this unbridled, bare-knuckled rage.

  Jess said, “I know you don’t believe me. I know you can’t forgive me.”

  Dani turned and looked at her. “How do you know what I can or can’t do? You don’t know what I’ll do.” She clenched and unclenched her fists. “You don’t know what I’m capable of.”

  In that moment, she didn’t know what she was capable of. She looked down and saw Jess’s umbrella lying on the table. She picked it up, tested its weight. Compact. Leaden with rain. Blunt.

  “Dani,” Jess said.

  Dani stepped toward her, wielding the umbrella in both hands like a short bat.

  Jess stumbled past her to the deck stairs. On the bottom step, she tripped and fell, landing face-first on the ground. Dani heard the air go out of her, even through the drumbeat of rain.

  Dani followed her down the stairs.

  Jess scrambled to her feet and started to run again. She seemed to tilt to the right. She slipped and fell again, this time landing on her hands and knees.

  Dani hit the ground and chased after her, almost slipping herself on the muddy, slick grass. She reached Jess before she could get up.

  On her knees, Jess looked up at Dani. Her mascara streamed black down her cheeks. She sat on her heels and lifted her chin, her eyes wide open. Seeing her posture, Dani thought of the Greeks, of supplication. She thought of her father, on his knees, too. Begging. Please, Dani. She waited for Jess to say the same.

  Instead, Jess said, “Go ahead.” She said, “If you’re going to do it, do it.”

  “Don’t tell me
what to do.” Dani lifted the umbrella over her head with both hands. She stared down at Jess’s face, blurry now. “How could you? Why would you do this to me?”

  “I didn’t,” Jess said.

  “He loves you!” Dani said, and she raised her arms high.

  “Dani!” her mother called. “Where are you?”

  Dani and Jess stared at each other.

  “Here, Mom,” she said. She dropped her arms. She dropped the umbrella at her feet. She stepped away, her eyes on Jess.

  Jess rose to her feet. The knees of her jeans were torn, her clothes smeared with mud. This time, she walked fast, taking long steps along the grass. She slipped once but caught herself, throwing her arms out for balance.

  Dani ran up the deck stairs, where her mother stood in the doorway.

  “You’re soaked,” she said. “What on earth are you doing?”

  “I saw deer,” Dani said. “Five of them. They ran off.”

  Her mom reached out and wiped water from Dani’s cheek. “Come on. Strip down, and I’ll get you a towel and your robe.”

  Later, after her mother had gone to bed, Dani went to get her clothes and towel from the dryer. The garage door was ajar. Dani opened it and flipped on the single light. A string with a rubber ball hung from the roof and dangled over the spot where her father had once parked the Squareback to work on it. Oil drippings stained the concrete. She stared at the brown-black stains until she began to see shapes in them: a ship with a mast, a seismograph reading, cytoplasm, a face in silhouette. She blinked up at the bulb, unsure of how much time had passed. On her father’s workbench, she spotted a flashlight and a box of trash bags.