Into the Sun

by Deni Ellis Béchard

  When I first learned English, I tried to make sense of the words person and persona. The etymology was the same: per sona, that through which the sound passes, a word for an actor’s mask in ancient Etruscan. It came to mean character or function in Roman theater and, later, law. It embodied the knowledge that many individuals could assume one role, as well as its duties and powers. Maybe a mask was reassuring — a coherent part to play in the middle of so much chaos — like these masks of world-savers in war zones.

  I wanted to hold Alexandra’s face in my hands, wash it in spring water, and lift it into the light.

  Part 7

  Quebec: 1998–2006

  }

  ALEXANDRA

  Careful, he said. It was their game. To never touch. He might have started it. She was no longer sure. They’d been born together, and now, if they touched, would become one again. They neared in a game of chicken: simultaneous lunges for a plate of cookies or the TV remote. They cackled at the proximity of annihilation. When they brushed each other, they jumped away, pretending they’d almost touched. She pictured a spaceship escaping the pull of a black hole.

  Some days the ideas were hers: to create ninja weapons with nails and wires in the trash of a construction site; to rig up primitive telephones with tin cans and strings so they could talk while guarding both entrances to their house. Then the ideas would be his: to hone their slingshot skills with targets swinging from branches; to scatter bang-snaps on the back porch like landmines.

  They were twelve when they split and their ideas became their own, no longer a shared spirit of insurrection, a genie that moved between them. They’d begun spying on the houses in their neighborhood, keeping a journal of what people did. So much was uninteresting. Dinners at 225 Verchères where the family lit candles and the four girls resembled mice. In 366 Rouville, the wife walked between the kitchen and the living room, raising and shaking her hands and shouting as the fat husband sprawled before the hockey game.

  But there were revelations. The fat man alone watching naked people on TV as he banged his fist between his thighs. The oldest mouse girl in her bedroom with a shaggy boy, taking turns sucking smoke from a glass tube before he lowered his pants and lay back as if at the doctor’s, and his pale mushroom sprouted. In 410 Bourget, the grotesquely muscled husband often had sex with his tiny wife who wore a fluffy yellow nightgown like a marshmallow Peep.

  Sometimes they spied on an elderly invalid. His yard was an infiltrator’s heaven, crowded with trees and bushes, banks of lanky weeds bursting through flowerbeds. Parked in his wheelchair on the back porch, he slouched, half asleep.

  They dared each other to get close, crabbing and wriggling on the ground, burrs and hard seeds embedded in their clothes. Jowly, glowering, his belly bulging, the invalid didn’t move. A tube ran to his nose from metal tanks on his wheelchair. They’d thought he was a vegetable until they saw him finger the switches on his armrest and drive his whirring seat into the house.

  Alexandra had been at a birthday party the day the split with Samuel happened. A new girl had invited her, not realizing Alexandra wasn’t popular, or maybe obliged by her mother to ask all the girls in her class. Alexandra tried to ignore the invitation, but at the last minute the thought of cake overwhelmed her, and she ran out the door, shouting to Sam that she had to go, the way their mother did when picking up a last-minute shift at the bar.

  She entered the house unnoticed, all the girls surrounding Alpha, the only boy there, as if he were the birthday present. Alpha was tall, from Ivory Coast, and each time he played pin the tail on the donkey, he won. They made him do it over and over, adjusting his blindfold, spinning him, and reluctantly letting him go. He wandered, bumping into them playfully, but always found his way to the donkey.

  Les nègres, the birthday girl’s father told them from the back porch doorway where he stood with his beer, they’re more physical than us. It’s like throwing a cat from a window.

  The girls rushed Alpha upstairs, still blindfolded, to a bedroom, and as one opened the window, the others took turns kissing him on the mouth or cheeks. They leaned him against the sill as Alexandra hung back, wanting to rush in and kiss him too. Alpha began to tip and pulled off the blindfold, laughing. Seeing his eyes, they calmed and returned downstairs. They ate cake, and when it was time to open presents, Alexandra slipped out. She hadn’t brought one.

  When he’d found himself alone, Sam had left their house to prowl. Though he was angry at Alexandra, he later told her what had happened, his excitement overriding his resentment. He’d been crouching in the weeds at the invalid’s house when the old man spoke.

  Boy, he called from the wheelchair. It was the first time Sam had heard his voice. I’m going to pay you a lot of money to do something for me.

  Sam had half risen from his crouch, ready to bolt. He’d schemed for nothing so hard as money: the key to sugar, the savagery of films, the superpowers in comic books.

  I asked him what I had to do for the money, he told Alexandra. They lay in their beds across the room from each other. She closed her eyes, imagining him standing up from the weeds.

  You any good with that slingshot? the old man asked.

  Yeah. I’m good.

  Ten dollars. I’ll give you ten dollars for every squirrel you kill.

  Here?

  Anywhere. They don’t respect whose property is whose. They come from all over and eat and shit and have babies. They chew through the eaves and make nests in the walls and attic. They’re rats with fluffy tails.

  The neighborhood was full of squirrels. Sam counted them: in a tree; on a fence, an electric wire, and a gutter. He ran to the driveway and back with a fistful of gravel. The old man’s expression remained saurian, the skin of his throat loose. Sam aimed and shot. The chunk of gravel struck the squirrel in the hips. It almost fell off the branch, extending its legs for better purchase. With his head back, Sam stepped, trees and telephone poles pivoting against the sky. He hit near the squirrel’s nose, and it ran. He shot its flank, and it fell but caught the top of the fence and was gone.

  You’ll need something better, the old man said. There’s a cage in the garage. It’s a trap.

  Sam described to Alexandra the cluttered garage: workbenches heaped with tools, dusty boxes to the ceiling. He took a cage with spring-powered doors and carried it to Mr. Leclerc, whose name he learned from the mail on the kitchen counter when he was sent to get peanut butter.

  At the bottom of the oak tree, among the husks of acorns, he smeared the trap’s trigger plate.

  The wait was short. A squirrel trotted across the yard, paused, and stood on its hind legs to sniff. It made quick for the trap, nosed around, and went inside. The doors snapped shut.

  We got the fucker, Mr. Leclerc said. Pick up the cage without putting your fingers in there, and don’t let its doors come unlocked. Those monsters bite.

  The squirrel thrashed, making a throaty growl with intermittent chirps. Sam slid his hands beneath the cage. Inches from his face, the squirrel threw its body against the wires.

  Bring it inside, Mr. Leclerc said. He touched the controls on his chair and it whirred, carrying him through the kitchen into the bathroom. He lifted a plastic stool with metal legs out of the tub and told Sam to set the cage where it had been.

  The squirrel was clutching the wires, staring.

  Do you think hot or cold water is better? Mr. Leclerc asked. It gets really hot.

  When Sam reached for the knob with the red circle, Mr. Leclerc chuckled. Do cold. I like your spirit, but the water will be too hot to get the cage out, and we can kill one more today.

  The squirrel thrashed again, soaking itself before the water was an inch deep. Its fur spiked, standing in daggers, its tail narrow and feral, ratlike at last. It grabbed the cage’s ceiling and hoisted itself there until the water was too high.

  Alexandra didn’t understand
why the man had chosen Sam. He’d earned thirty dollars. She’d played in the yard just as much. She could see and hear everything she’d missed. The way the squirrel lashed the cage with its body, a blur of movement, and then went still, only its legs twitching. The line of dwindling bubbles that rose like beads from its mouth. The old man smoking afterward, the way lovers do in movies.

  The next day, Mr. Leclerc refused her. T’es une fille — You’re a girl. Only Sam could do his bidding. He kept using the trap, drowning squirrels, but Mr. Leclerc also taught him to make his slingshot lethal with used ball bearings from auto repair shops. Sam shot squirrels out of trees and off power lines, and then dispatched them with a club. The old man watched, sometimes tolerating Alexandra as she stood on the edge of the porch. More often than not, though, he shooed her home.

  Sam, she called. Viens!

  Va-t-en, he replied. Go away. I’m working. He spoke the way their mother did when they called the bar, music blaring in the background, to get her to arbitrate a fight.

  Evenings, Sam returned to Alexandra, flush with cash but reluctant to let her see it.

  Come on, she said. Let’s go spy. I’ve been waiting all day.

  He followed her onto the back porch, where the wind gusted, pushed by distant clouds. The maple beyond their yard shook in the yellow radiance of the streetlamp. They plodded along the sidewalk. They weren’t furtive. There was no joyous scrabbling and prowling. She walked behind as if goading him. They passed the mouse family’s dining room and the kitchen of the angry wife, and let themselves into the garden inside the fence.

  From their vantage, they could see into the bathroom. In the mirror, the muscular man and his little wife were brushing their teeth and spitting. The man came out and flopped onto the bed, his forearm across his eyes. The woman followed, pushed off the shoulder straps of her thin blue gown, and flicked it with her foot over the lampshade, filling the room with the watery glow of an aquarium.

  Facing the bed, she made a ta-da motion with her hands. He peeked from under his forearm and shook his head. She crossed her arms beneath her breasts, her voice warbling behind the glass. He shook his head again. She crawled onto the bed and did what the mouse girl had done to the shaggy boy. Soon the big man was on his knees and they were having sex.

  The sound of Sam’s breathing vanished. The man banged his hips and flipped the woman onto her back. Heat spread through Alexandra’s chest.

  Sam drew back the slingshot’s elastic and shut the eye closest to her, his face going dark. She moved behind him, sighting along his arm. The metal crook moved from the man to the glinting ring in her belly button, and finally to the place where he plunged in and out.

  Sam let off a shot and the window thudded, cracks jabbing out from an icy hole. The lamp in the corner shattered, the bulb briefly tumbling within the shade before it died.

  Alexandra sprinted behind Sam to their house and through the back door. They stood against the wall panting, and she took his hand. His fingers didn’t grip hers back. He just breathed. She pressed her nails into his palm. His skin was cool. She let go.

  There was milk and a plate of toast with jam on the table. The cereal was piled higher than the bowls. Their mother was cutting sandwiches and putting them in lunch bags. A macaroni casserole cooled on the stove for their dinner. The air smelled of burnt cheese.

  There was a shooting last night, she told them. That’s what people are saying. But one of the police who dropped by the bar told me it was someone with a slingshot.

  Alexandra held down the mound of cereal and poured the milk between two of her fingers, and then passed it to Sam.

  Their mother studied them, her hand on the counter, the hem of her skirt against her thick calves. Sam shoveled cereal into his mouth.

  At school, kids talked about the shooting. They said there’d been a silencer on the gun. No one was supposed to walk in front of windows anymore.

  Sam sat across the classroom from Alexandra with a few of the popular boys. He was wearing new running shoes. It was the first time he hadn’t picked a desk near hers. Normally, they kept to themselves, navigating the dangers of unpopularity, avoiding attention to keep the bullies from commenting on how they were dressed. They often argued with their mother, asking her to spend more on their clothing, but she said her priority was rent, heating, water, food. They didn’t mind being cold and would stop taking showers, they told her. Only when their clothes were far too small would she replace them.

  Sam must have changed into the shoes in the school bathroom, Alexandra thought. At lunch, he sat with the popular boys again, who were considered delinquents. He shared candy bars with them and leaned forward, speaking, and they all laughed.

  Let’s do it again, she told him after school.

  He said nothing, just got his slingshot and bag of ball bearings, put them in his backpack, and went out.

  She stayed home and, in the days that followed, gave up trying to go with him. She read until the sunset condensed against the horizon and faded from the cluttered rooftops, the streetlights coming on, the fading glow in the western sky merging with the city’s amber night.

  She’d once had a tiny grandmother, pale skin, the bones of her face like pieces of broken teacups, her eyes as blue as the sky above the water crashing on rocks, the Baie des Chaleurs visible from her creaking wooden porch. Alexandra and Sam and their mother had visited her each summer, a day in the car just to get there. She had an old black Lab, and after her funeral, Alexandra lay with it on the floor, hugging it as it twitched in its dreams, its feet in a quivering run, its heart thudding. She listened to the squelch of its intestines, throaty growls and whimpers. She stroked through the coarse fur, searching for the soft spots. Then her mother drove the dog somewhere, though Alexandra had begged to keep it.

  There was the story of their father from that same town on the bay. He left them or maybe died — depending on which evening their mother told it. Her mom hated talking about him. I’m doing my job, she said. I’m raising you. You can’t ask for more than that.

  As the weeks passed, Sam came home later and less often. He no longer showed interest in the books. He slept over with his new friends or walked to school before she was ready.

  Alexandra wandered from yard to yard alone. Before, the world had been laid out for her, windows like the frames in comics. Now she feared the people would stare back, that she would be discovered, the gardens flooded with police lights and sirens.

  They were almost fourteen when Mr. Leclerc died. Sam told Alexandra the house had been emptied and put up for sale. She’d never known the extent of the agreement between her brother and the old man, only that he killed squirrels and kept him company at times, or ran chores. He told her he’d met Leclerc’s daughter, who was well past fifty and suffered from back pains that made her visits rare. Sam never saw her again after the death.

  La crisse de bitch, he told Alexandra. He must have left me some money. What am I going to do?

  Now, every day after school, he went to the weight room with his friends. He’d become broad through the shoulders, his movements swift and defiant. He stood or turned as if to throw a punch. At home, he was always reluctant to go inside, pacing the yard or sitting on the porch.

  He hung out with dropouts and older kids, got in fights, stole from stores and cars, and sold drugs. He told their mother he did odd jobs so he could buy clothes. Alexandra heard rumors from her classmates about a brawl: one of his friends beat up for selling hash at a metro station on a local gang’s turf, and Sam among the group that took revenge, leaving one teenager with a broken collarbone and another with a concussion.

  Alexandra spent more time at the library, where Mrs. Ducharme, the librarian, often recommended her favorite books. Alexandra read them quickly, and when she returned them, Mrs. Ducharme asked her questions — casual oral quizzes — her mouth quivering with a contained smile. Her daughte
r, Julie, was in Alexandra’s grade. She was a skinny, flat-chested girl who chewed the tips of her hair and rarely spoke, vanishing between classes, as if she’d learned to dematerialize to pass through the gaggles of popular girls who’d tormented her since kindergarten.

  At Alexandra’s house, there was only one bedroom for her and Sam, and sometimes, when he did come home to sleep or get clothes, he stared at her in her threadbare pajamas, his eyes so deep-set his skull seemed like a helmet.

  Walking back from school on the first warm day of spring, she passed a police car in front of Mr. Leclerc’s house. Two officers walked around it, hands on their belts. The yard was mowed, the weeds gone, the trees pruned back, and all the windows broken.

  At home, in her room, she lifted the sash, dead bugs falling from the wood. She sat against the wall and read with her head near the sill, the fresh air at her cheek keeping her awake.

  A car engine grew louder and stopped just outside. Its doors creaked open, and voices spoke in the backyard, four or five of them — nasal and adolescent. One sounded older.

  The boys tramped disjointedly through the downstairs hallway. The house echoed, giving her vertigo, the sounds rising like waves, her room seeming to sway with the motion of the sea.

  It was too dark to read anymore. The boys laughed below her, bottles clinking.

  She stood up, her knees cracking, eased her door open, and crept down the stairs, putting her foot on the side of each step so that it wouldn’t creak. At the bottom, she peeked past the edge of the kitchen door.

  Sam and his friends were sitting around the table and on the counter, since there weren’t enough chairs. They wore jean and leather jackets, dirty sneakers, and scuffed boots. An older boy was at the table, his blond hair swept behind his ears and his beard shaved except for a patch beneath his bottom lip. He jerked his head in her direction.