by Amy Bloom
After the funeral, their father was as much of a ghost as they imagined their mother to be. He plunged himself into work at their school where he was a principal, and spared little time for them, his grieving girls. He never dated and spent his nights staring at the television. The girls didn’t know what to do with their grief or their father’s indifference and tried to win his attention in their own ways. The thing the girls held onto was each other, even as they started moving in different directions. At night after dinner they sat on their beds and gabbed about their day. On Saturday afternoons, they washed and pressed each other’s hair, and on Sundays they cooked dinner while talking about books and boys. They reminisced about their mother as they prepared the recipes in the cookbooks she kept above the stove.
* * *
At seventeen, Vanya was a tall girl with high cheekbones, a broad nose, and almond-shaped eyes. She possessed a quiet, easygoing nature and was well liked, but had become a loner like their father. Girls in her class called her stuck up and snooty. Olivia was petite with a nose that turned up at the end and ears that stuck out a little like their mother’s. Her smile drew people to her and she reminded almost everyone of their mother, who had sparkled at the center of any group.
* * *
I woke up on the couch Friday morning, and potato chips and empty Coke cans littered the coffee table. The house was quiet. My mom would kill me if she knew I’d guzzled three cans while doing the rest of my homework. The TV was still on and a reporter stood in front of a charred building on what looked like Bradley Street near my school, Saint Mary’s. People swarmed behind the reporter, a few of them waving while others seemed to just want to hear what she was saying. I spied my mom in the back of the crowd, wearing her faded jean jacket. Her eyes were puffy, her hair uncombed, and my mom did not do uncombed hair, ever.
The reporter introduced a tall man named Captain Johnson who stepped up to the mic. Sweat trickled down his pale, heat-reddened face as the camera zoomed in on him. Looking directly in the camera, he began, and I listened.
“Yesterday, at approximately seven p.m., a Caucasian male entered the Planned Parenthood clinic and detonated an explosive device. It seems there may have been as many as twenty women in the building at the time. We will release names to the media after we’ve identified the victims and notified their families.” He abruptly turned away from the camera and the reporter took over. I didn’t hear a word she said.
My dad was out of town at a conference, so I couldn’t ask him any of the questions swirling through my head. Not that he’d have answers; he and Aunt V had kept their distance since that first summer when she came home.
I ran to my room, stuffed my legs into a pair of jeans, and threw on a T-shirt over my nightgown. It was still early and as the sun rose over the tops of the trees, streaking the sky a golden orange, I pedaled hard, my heart pounding in my ears as random thoughts about Aunt V floated in my brain. Shoes. She loved shoes and had over a hundred pairs. I knew because the week before she’d paid me fifty cents a pair to organize them for her, and I’d earned sixty-seven dollars. The shoes sat on the large closet shelf, each in a cloudy-white plastic box. I’d taped Polaroid pictures to each—red pumps, purple sandals, orange suede boots, pink high-top sneakers, burgundy penny loafers . . .
I got to Bradley Street and there were people everywhere—police, firemen, neighbors, kids. I scanned the crowd for my mother, hoped to see my aunt. Glass, paper, and broken furniture littered the sidewalk and street. Men in uniforms carried black bags like the ones you see on crime shows from the building and lined them up on the grass outside the front door. The smell of smoke filled my nose and throat, and the faint smell of burning hay wafted through the crowd.
* * *
Olivia and Vanya had always shared secrets, and in high school Vanya dubbed Olivia their queen. They’d reveal their confidences before hooking their pinkies, gazing into each other’s eyes, and repeating a solemn phrase they’d learned from their mother: Forever and Always. Olivia told tales of the things she and Seth got up to when she snuck out to meet him at night. V didn’t really like Seth. He was a know-it-all whose mother talked about Olivia, called her wild and worse. Olivia’s biggest secret spilled out the night of her graduation, the night she left town with Seth.
Olivia threw clothes in a suitcase as V tossed her sister’s blouses, skirts, and shoes out of the blue bag until she caught that gleam in Olivia’s eye. She knew Olivia would not be stopped.
“Where you going?” Vanya asked.
“New York or Washington. Seth got into Howard and NYU.” She stopped packing and added, “I’m pregnant. I thought about, you know,” she touched her still slim stomach, “but I can’t do it.”
Olivia closed her eyes for a moment, then tossed a pair of faded jeans into the almost full bag.
“You gonna marry him?”
“Yes,” Olivia answered.
“You know Dad’s gonna try to stop you.”
“When has he ever tried to stop me from doing anything?” O said. “When has he ever cared? Besides, it’s gonna be our secret.” She held out her pinkie, but V didn’t take it. O closed her suitcase as a tear rolled down her nose. She walked to the door.
“Wait!” Vanya called. She hopped off the bed and went to her dresser where she kept her box of memories. It’d been the last Christmas gift she got from their mother. She pulled out a bunch of crumpled bills and stuffed them into her sister’s hand. “Take this,” she said, then extended her pinky.
* * *
Seth started at Howard soon after he and Olivia arrived in DC. They lived in a tiny apartment with furniture they found or picked up from tag sales, and Olivia hated it. After a while she started to hate Seth too, but she stayed. She lost the baby a few months after they left home; she tried to forget and found a job on campus answering phones for the English department. When Seth graduated, they moved back to New Haven, where Olivia worked at Malley’s in the children’s department while Seth went to law school and they tried to have another baby. She missed her sister.
Vanya graduated the May after Olivia left and went off to Spelman College. She made friends. She danced at parties and sipped fruity cocktails on dates. She studied for classes and talked to Olivia at least once a week. They still shared secrets but now Vanya’s were juicier than O’s. O had settled into a life with Seth while V had started kissing boys and skipping classes. By the time Vanya graduated, Olivia’s little indiscretions tasted like dry white toast in comparison to her butter-and-jam-slathered tales. Vanya went home to New Haven for a week before moving to Montreal to study nursing and didn’t return home for ten years.
* * *
You got off the plane wishing you didn’t look as raggedy as you knew you did. You were ready to start again and go back to before everything had spiraled out of control. Olivia had called almost every day that first year you lived in Montreal, and you’d gab for hours about your new grown-up lives—your classes in nursing school, her relationship with Seth, the baby they never had. A year went by, then two. You finished nursing school and found a job as an ER nurse. Olivia chaired committees, and hosted dinner parties, and you spoke to her less and less. You were lonely, and tired all the time, and you wanted to talk to your sister. Most days you struggled to keep your eyes open, especially on night shifts—you started doing it as a way to stay awake, a way to feel something on the days when life was a gray cloud you trudged through. You told yourself it was no big deal. Lots of the nurses did it. A hit here, a toke there, and before you knew it, you craved its caresses like a lover’s. Some days you didn’t even go to work, and when days turned to weeks, they fired you. You’d stare at your cracked reflection in another broken mirror, in another bathroom, in another bar, and as you painted your lips, you’d wonder who that hollow-cheeked woman was. When it got bad and you couldn’t pay your rent, you’d call your father for money but never told him you’d lost your job, or that your belly was growing, or that your home was a run-down hotel
, or that you turned tricks for hits. You loved the act of preparing it, measuring it, grinding it, cooking it, but especially smoking it. The bittersweet acridness of the blue smoke, the crackle of tiny, quartzy rocks as you kissed them with flame. You’d close your eyes and inhale, hold the smoke in your lungs, and then blow it all out as the smooth, tingly sensation creeped from brain to toes. You loved that most of all until the baby kicked and you knew you had to quit. You called Olivia. She came and stayed five months, and you stopped, and when she left, you hooked your pinkies and whispered, “Forever and Always,” before Olivia closed the cab door and flew home with the baby. It didn’t take long for you to start again. You missed O, couldn’t find a job, and the hole in your chest throbbed as you thought of your baby, her baby, and you smoked. The first time you landed in jail you told yourself it’s no big deal. Ten arrests for solicitation later and you spent eighteen months in prison and they shipped you back to Connecticut. You’d missed your father’s funeral. A heart attack took him and you hadn’t found out until three months after it happened because Olivia didn’t always accept your calls. She never came to visit, never sent pictures of your baby, her baby. No one picked you up from Union Station and you loaded your bags into a cab, reciting Forever and Always in your head because you wanted to tell her you were home and she was yours—but not yet.
* * *
I was eight the summer I met Aunt V. The sun slipped in and out of clouds as I played jacks on the porch. My mom talked about her, but she’d never come to visit. “Work,” my mom told me. She sent me cards for my birthday and every Christmas. I sat on the porch, tossing up my jacks ball, waiting for her to come, and when a yellow cab pulled up to our curb, I skipped down the front walk to meet her.
“Nelly, it is a pleasure.” She squeezed my hand then hugged me until I almost couldn’t breathe. Her almond-shaped eyes and broad nose were like mine. In our baby pictures our cheeks and smiles are so similar, like twins people said as they flipped through the family album Mom kept on the coffee table. Her curly Afro bounced as her yellow heels clicked up the front steps. Aunt V didn’t look as pretty as the girl in the photos, though. She was pencil-thin with a trace of ash around her lips. I was dragging her bag up the stairs to my room when she asked me, “Where’s your mom?”
“In the kitchen.” I nodded my head toward the open door, and after I put her bag on the second twin bed in my room, I ran downstairs. Mom and Aunt V sat on the couch in the living room and I settled on the bottom step to listen.
“Thanks for letting me stay. I start work at the end of July so I should be able to get my own place by September.”
“I hope so, because Seth is not going to be happy if it’s longer than that, and you have to go to the meetings, Vanya. And no more secrets. Clear?”
“Crystal.” Aunt V’s voice was crisp and gravelly.
I thought they’d be happier to see each other, but they circled each other like kids on the playground before doing battle, only breaking the silence when Aunt V gave a tight little laugh. “Guess I’m the Queen of Secrets now, huh?” The Queen of Secrets—I liked the way it sounded: mysterious, dark.
“You don’t have to be,” my mom answered her. “Just know I love you, V, and that we want to help, really.”
“We? Seth too? That boy finally off his high horse?”
“Vanya, that’s not fair.”
“Well, he wasn’t fair, and he’s the guy who got his underage girlfriend drunk and knocked her up. Clear?”
“Crystal,” my mom said, and they burst out laughing. They talked for hours that night. I could hear their voices buzzing as I waited for Aunt V to come to bed.
* * *
Aunt V became my best friend that summer. We spent whole days doing everything and nothing. In July, we went to the beach and she taught me how to swim. She moved into her own place over on Kensington Street near the hospital in September, and that fall, we gobbled bunless hot dogs out of a thermos as we sat on the hood of Mom’s car, feeling the airplanes roaring above us as they soared to foreign places like Australia and Turkey.
She smoked long white cigarettes, and at Thanksgiving she and Mom giggled as I imitated her by puffing on a straw and teetering across the front room’s green carpet in her red pumps with heels as long as my pencils. Her chocolatey perfume tickled my nose when she whispered in my ear. Sometimes I’d catch her studying me as I watched TV or did homework, and it made my stomach wiggle.
She gave me a Polaroid camera that Christmas and the first picture I snapped was of her. I pinned it to the bulletin board in my room. She is sitting on the floor in the kitchen. Her feet are bare, and her legs, which are spread wide in front of her, are swallowed by the red-and-green puddle of her full skirt. A little red ball hangs in the air in front of her face, and her hand is poised to sweep up a gleaming row of jacks on the floor. A half-full martini glass sits next to her and an imprint of her red lips decorates its rim. She is laughing.
* * *
You tried to stay clean. You snuck a few drinks at first, craved a hit, but then you started the job, and NA, and you stopped. Three months later you moved into your own place, reconnected with old friends, went back to church, and stayed clean until He came. He found you at the hospital where you worked and where you and Olivia had once sat in hard orange chairs waiting for your mommy to walk from behind the washed-out green curtain. You’d waited and waited, but she never came. You became a nurse because of that night, and you loved your job, but after a while the long hours and the dying exacted their toll, and you couldn’t breathe, felt like you were sinking, just like you had in those orange chairs the night your mom died. Some days you drank, and you craved a hit, just one hit. He followed you home from one of the NA meetings at the church where Olivia volunteered. You’d started going when It had called to you, when Its memory tickled your brain, and you tried to ignore It. He never said a word to you until the day he approached you at the bus stop.
“Hello,” he said. “We need to talk.”
You didn’t remember telling him anything about home. You’d stopped seeing him when you’d told him about the baby. He’d wanted you to get rid of it and keep tricking, and you thought about it, but much like Olivia all those years ago, you couldn’t do it.
“No,” you’d said, and he left you alone. That’s when you called O.
The bus eased to a stop, and you got on, leaving him standing there. Three days later, you spotted him outside the hospital, and a week after that he showed up as you got off the bus at O’s house, and your body went cold.
“What do you want?” you asked him.
“To talk about . . . about . . . you know.” His blue green eyes slipped to O’s house and you knew he knew, so you agreed to meet him at his hotel.
You met him the next night at the Pond Lily, because no one would know you there. You guzzled three martinis in the bar before heading to his room. He offered you a drink and you nodded. You sat at the scratched brown desk.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Better than some, not as well as others,” you responded, then sipped the glass of warm bourbon. “And you?”
He shrugged his thick shoulders, his hands hanging at his sides. He needed a shave and his breath stank.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“Who?” you said, raising an eyebrow, gripping the glass.
“I know,” he said.
“Know what?” You thought of Nelly and your sister, even of Seth, despite him still acting funky whenever you visited.
You went to him and whispered in his ear, “She died.” You kissed him and he kissed back, and then you felt his warm fingers at your throat, squeezing.
“Liar.” He let go and you gasped for air, then sucked down the rest of the bourbon. You slipped your hand in your purse and felt it there, and you knew you would do it. You apologized to him in your head and kissed him before pulling him to the bed. You would do it.
When you woke up, he was still sleeping. You sli
pped on your clothes and wiped the glass, the desk, the bed frame. You pulled a syringe from your purse and filled it with the insulin you’d taken from the hospital. Forever and Always, you thought as you eased the liquid into him. You left and started again. One time, one hit, you told yourself as you left the Pond Lily. When you got home you bought a package from the boy on your front stoop.
That day melted into months, and now you were strung out again, about to lose your job again, the Queen of Secrets again. You sat on the toilet, your mouth dry, your palms sweaty, your head pounding as the blue line on the end of a white plastic stick stared at you, and you wondered if you could do this again. It was the same as before—the same guy, the same blurry emptiness like those impressionist paintings Nelly loved. You wanted to tell Olivia but couldn’t take Seth’s condemnation, not again, so you told your diary. You chronicled everything between its pages: every booze-soaked night, every baby that died in your arms, that night with him, your daughter and how you dreamed of her and you together knowing it could never be.
* * *
My mother talked to a policeman. Emergency workers scurried around, people chattered, reporters interviewed witnesses in the crowd. I dropped my bike and ran to Mom.
“What are you doing here?” I asked her, knowing the answer, wanting to be wrong.
“Janelle.” Her glassy red eyes held mine.
“I saw you on the news. Where’s Aunt V?”
“You shouldn’t be here, baby.”
“Where is Aunt Vanya?” I pulled her arm, my voice rising.
* * *
Olivia dropped you off at six forty-five. On the ride over, you’d wanted to tell her everything. You’d tried the night before. You’d spent the night so you could get to the clinic early and maybe avoid the people with the posters chanting, “Baby Killer!” as you walked into the clinic. You’d wanted to tell her before you went to bed in Nelly’s room, but you could not find the words. As you got out of the car, she matter-of-factly uttered, “Call when you’re ready.” No smile of assurance, no hug for strength. Five or six protesters lined the sidewalk and you tried to ignore them, tried not to see the tiny baby parts splattered across their signs.