Everything You Came to See

by Elizabeth Schulte Martin

  Adrienne began by vacuuming the living room and going through Kylie’s suitcase to look for anything that might be important to her. She took out her jewelry box and a folder full of papers and stashed it in the trunk of her car. She didn’t go through these things, but she thought that if Kylie owned anything of importance, it would be in one or the other of these places. After that she did the guest room. Henry’s valuables were just as simple to find: a stack of VHS tapes wrapped in plastic; a letter that looked like a dog had chewed on it; a notebook; a ziplock bag full of his mother’s pictures; and a book of American presidents.

  She knew she had to work fast, and she would not have dreamed of going through Henry’s mother’s things before—but now that the bag was in her hand, she couldn’t resist opening it. She leafed through the book, and Henry’s namesake’s page was marked with a photograph of a stripper licking another stripper’s boot.

  “Good grief.”

  She put Henry’s things with Kylie’s, in the trunk.

  Preserving Caleb’s precious things, and her own, proved a little more difficult. Kylie and Henry came in with backpacks. But this had been her and Caleb’s home for years, time with which to accumulate many things of sentimental value: a paper rose that she gave Caleb (she didn’t know how many Valentine’s Days ago) laid on top of a bookcase; their Christmas ornaments had been collected one by one, chosen carefully by the two of them to represent in some way the events of the year in which they were purchased. The first year they were so poor that they couldn’t afford a Christmas ornament, and so 1979 was represented by a light bulb Caleb had painted and wrapped in pipe cleaners.

  Keeping a light bulb from shattering for twelve years was not easy, and now Adrienne was certain that the thing wouldn’t make it to their next Christmas. There were so many objects she wanted to save, but things like ornaments and dried roses did not make the cut. If she counted roses and light bulbs, she might as well count the china and the framed pictures, the countertops and the drywall. She might as well save the whole house for its sentimental value, and she’d already decided against that.

  Once the car was loaded, she started the real work—the work that she’d needed to go to Azi to learn how to do. At least, she’d learned the science of how to do it from Azi, the materials to use, the bare pyrotechnics. The criminal savvy she’d borrowed from Curtis. She’d gone to see him at the warehouse one day and apologized for having perhaps overreacted the night he came to her house. But mostly she was there to ask him questions that she knew he would answer with lies. She wanted to see how this was done. How to not let the cat out of the bag, how to not feel guilt so she wouldn’t look guilty.

  After she’d studied his lying long enough to learn what she needed to know, they’d parted amicably for once. Even though she still thought Curtis was a shit, she did, sort of, forgive him. When he left her, he was doing what had to be done, what anybody might do in his situation, which was push the dead away. She understood his fear, his reasoning, and it seemed now to her that Curtis probably did love her, which was why he had to push her so hard. Dead people couldn’t be allowed to linger in the front of the mind, thrashing around. They’d just drag you into death with them. You had to keep dead people with you some other way, keep them in dreams, keep them in ziplock bags. Be honest about what you could afford to carry.

  From beneath the bathroom sink, she took out a jar of cotton balls that had been soaking in rubbing alcohol. She unscrewed the plate on the circuit breaker and stuffed the wet fibers in the spaces between each breaker switch. The alcohol made her light-headed, but the smell was pleasant and familiar.

  It was funny, she thought. As soon as she got her home the way she wanted it, she had to burn it down. She’d told Caleb she didn’t care if they put the house up for collateral and lost it, and he’d tentatively agreed to apply for the loan, but she was concerned that even if he applied, he could be denied. Or Seamus would want too much for the circus, and it would look suspicious to collect a pile of insurance money right after applying for the loan. If she was going to try this, it had to be now.

  She scratched the side of her nose and felt the smallest soreness—under this cartilage, things were still healing, bones were still fusing back together, and Adrienne worried. She worried that this plan wouldn’t work, that Caleb would be left with nothing. If her tumor grew again, he would not even have her. Even if her tumor didn’t grow back, the strain on her heart from powering a body so large would shorten her life, without question. She ached to think of Caleb with nothing—no circus, no wife, and no house. It was the only thing that caused her to second-guess herself. It made her consider pulling the cotton out of the breaker, forgetting it, and doing things the normal way.

  But Adrienne figured that most people don’t get what they really want the normal, safe way. She had always hoped to be more beauty than freak, but here she was, with her big, shaking fingers soaked in alcohol, trying to start a fire that would look like an accident. Nothing could have been more freakish. She was grinding bones to make bread.

  She lined the lower lip of the circuit box with the cotton, pieces drawn long, their filaments stretched so that the fire could burn fast once it reached these, sparking on a thin wisp that waved the flame on to the next thin wisp before it got to the denser stuffing above. Azi had said that it mostly mattered where the fire started. If the breaker box was the origin, the fire would appear to be electrical, though he warned her that her insurance would investigate, and they would be looking for any scrap of evidence that might indicate that the fire was set. The rubbing alcohol was difficult to detect as a catalyst, he told her, and the cotton would burn to nothing. “But you’ll want to get out of the house before it burns,” he said, “so you’ll need something to slow down the process a bit … probably a candle, but not the kind with the little metal wafer at the bottom for holding the wick …”

  She placed a yellow birthday candle, with its base burned to a flat pancake of wax so that it would stand on its own, on the shelf below the bare circuits nestled in cotton.

  Was it too late to stop?

  No. But here was the match in her hand, and here she was striking it.

  She screwed the front of the breaker back on, hiding the flame she’d planted.

  Before she left, she got Richard and put him in his small cage. He and her purse full of Southern Blue orders were the only things she took from the house for herself.

  This Is Number Seven

  Every song I sing to her, she hates.

  We’re on the circus grounds, because where else would we be, and I start in with “Come On, Eileen.”

  And Kylie, who’s sitting on a lawn chair across from me, throws one of her shoes at my head, like she couldn’t care less that I’ve got a broken collarbone and a cast up to my elbow. She doesn’t mind picking on the infirmed.

  I guess it is a little bad. I only know about half the lyrics.

  “Sing anything else,” says Kylie. “That song is terrible.”

  I keep it up. “Oh, you have a dress … Oh, my hots I confess …”

  She hates all my acts, too, so I’ve decided to let her write them. I’m throwing in the towel on the writing. I said I would write five, and this is number seven, and I’m done. But I gave it a shot, Christiakov. Maybe soon I’ll be able to show you a waterfall of pages, but you’ll just have to take my word for it that they’re acts, because I won’t let you read a word.

  There aren’t any trees on the grounds, but the leaves are still blowing through from somewhere, tumbling through the dust like orange and yellow pinwheels. Caleb is sitting on a lawn chair looking all worried about the money, about Feely and Feinstein, about the black skeleton of the house in Dogtown that some suit is investigating right now.

  Adrienne doesn’t fit in a lawn chair. She stands. I guess she looks worried, too, but she smiles when I sing.

  Number seven is my mother’s act.

  I can see it: she dances to the strangest, darkest songs, not
the bubbly disco that the other girls dance to. They like her because of this and because she moves like she does, shoulders jerking, legs kicking high, then coming down, the momentum pulling her into a fury of pirouettes. And then she slows, glides toward the floor, a raindrop down a window pane, a sultry, snaking path. She is where I got this genius, Christiakov. She knows every muscle in her body, and she uses it to tell you the story you want to hear. She is just scary enough onstage but if she talks to you, she’s so sweet and interested, like you are the center of the universe. She makes you special, even though you are nothing, just a fat ugly guy in a strip club, or a boy who thinks he can make himself into a wheel.

  I used to think I didn’t get enough time. I used to think it would take me my whole life to tell her, sufficiently, how I loved her; and too-bad-so-sad, she wasn’t around for my whole life or really for much of it at all. But now I think what I got was enough—because it’s possible to show love in a matter of seconds. Hand on a shoulder. Head in a lap. Fingers through hair.

  This is the highest potential of the body.

  Caleb is trying to start a fire from scratch like a boy scout, trying to scrape a spark onto a pile of dry leaves and sticks. Adrienne rubs his back while he does it, and says, “That’s never going to work. It’s too windy.” And for a second everyone thinks, Trust her, she’s good at this.

  Caleb tosses a match and the contents of Adrienne’s lighter on the pile. It flashes up.

  The fire throws a yellow glow on our faces, and looking at Adrienne with that bright mask on, I still get a little jealous of Caleb, what he has—the most beautiful woman in the world. But here, he’s got his hand on her calf, which is where it should be, and he knows it, and I know it.

  I feel light right now, like I felt at that first show when the laughter came down and settled around us like snow. Inside, there’s nothing toxic. In fact, it feels like there’s nothing at all, no bones, broken or otherwise, no muscles. No heart or breath or blood.

  Kylie bites her nails. Before I started singing, she was staring into space like she was trying to figure out some unworkable problem. She and Adrienne and Caleb don’t seem to feel light. Whatsamatter? You got tacks in your shoes? my mother would’ve asked them. You got bubblegum in your underwear?

  I have more love than sense. I have more love than anything. I can think of my brothers and father without losing this love—something about seeing them in their own spheres, knowing they exist there, with or without me. I have already sent a letter to Frankie, telling him to walk at graduation. You can’t possibly start annoying people too early about this sort of stuff.

  “Come on … ta-loo-ra.”

  “It’s not funny anymore, Henry,” says Caleb.

  “Shhh, it’ll come back around again,” I say, and it does, because that’s how you work the running gag. You stick with it, until the last too-ra-loo-rah-aye, and I do. I stick with it until Kylie comes after me and I have to explode out of my lawn chair and run, kicking up the dust and leaves, cutting through the dark, past the animals, the Feely and Feinstein sign framed in burnt-out light bulbs. I’ll let her close the gap between us, let her catch me once we forget why we’re running. When we’re breathless and the movement is its own reason for itself. I’ll take her, and all the rest of them, to lightness. I’ll show them how it’s done.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS BOOK BEGAN AT CALIFORNIA State University’s Summer Arts program. I was an office assistant for the program and became obsessed with a certain clowning arts class after being tasked with ordering supplies for the course, including a preposterous number of red rubber noses. The earliest chapters of this were researched and written at Summer Arts, so I would like to thank the program, in particular Jim Spalding, Kelley Lansing, and Joanne Sharp, for encouraging me to write on the job and observe the clown class. I also wish to extend my gratitude to Hugh O’Gorman, David Shiner, and the students in that course for allowing me to observe. In addition, I’d like to thank Megan Ivey for kindly allowing me to interview her regarding her experiences as a clown.

  I have had the benefit of wonderful and encouraging writing teachers. Bill Starr and Mark O’Hara have left a lasting impact on my writing life, and the writing lives of so many of their students. I also want to thank Steve Lattimore, whose teaching shaped me immensely as a writer. I owe a debt to my fellow writing students, teachers, and guides at Fresno State; Steven Church, Connie Hales, Alex Espinoza, Daniel Chacón, Lillian Faderman, and especially Steve Yarbrough and David Anthony Durham have been sources of endless writing support, kindness, and patience. I would also like to thank Jill McCorkle and my Sewanee Writers’ Conference workshop for helping give this novel shape and bringing me back to the world of writing as I was untangling the world of first-time motherhood.

  I am so grateful to my writing group, Candace Duerksen, Carol Vitali, and Kristin FitzPatrick, who read this entire book, a chapter at a time, in its roughest form. I am also unbelievably grateful to Tiffany Crum for reading it (more than once) and for answering an endless number of neurotic questions about writing and publishing, sometimes at five in the morning.

  I want to extend my thanks to my agent Jordan Breindel and my editor Chelsey Emmelhainz for believing in this book’s worth, for seeing in it what I saw, and helping me shape it so that others could see it that way, too.

  I am deeply appreciative to my mother- and father-in-law Jo and Kenny Martin for cheering me on, and for providing me with my husband, Jonathan Martin. Jon, like most writers’ spouses, is the first reader of every piece of writing I produce, and I am grateful to him for weeding out the real trash, for moving across the country with me while I got my MFA, and for navigating everything with me, every day. I also want to thank my son, Audric, whose existence threw a new light on these chapters and helped me revise from the point of view of a person with an insanely high stake in the life of another.

  I am lucky enough to have an incredible family, nuclear and extended, and I want to offer my profound gratitude to all of them for their support. I especially wish to thank my brothers, Michael Schulte, Bill Schulte, and John Schulte, who have all encouraged my writing and listened to me complain about it pretty much their whole lives. Finally, I owe the greatest debt to my brilliant and hardworking mother and father, Patricia and Edward Schulte, who told me that I could do or make anything I conceived of, which is what parents are supposed to say, of course, but my parents meant it. They were unflinching about it, they said it without caveat, believed it from the bottom of their hearts. This has sustained me through this book, and everything else.