Back Talk

by Danielle Lazarin

  Adam had tried to push Owen out of this same window a few weeks before, after Owen had thrown his headphones into the tree below it. They’d always thrown things into this particular tree—bags of trash, old clothes, water balloons—just because they could, because they were stupid, boys. The headphones were broken, and in the past, Adam would have laughed, too, even if he would also strike back. Owen would have shown me some little bruise, something moon shaped he’d pretend didn’t bother him, but this time had been different. This time, the bruise Adam left was on Owen’s neck. The window guards should have been taken out years ago, the brothers long past ten years old, the age at which the city stops requiring them, but they were, for whatever reason, still in.

  “Lexie, Lexie, Leexxxxxieeee,” Adam started to sing, out of rhythm. He wouldn’t drop my gaze.

  Adam had been, before this, beautiful, but on that day I began to wonder if that beauty wasn’t something else, if that thing that Kira always called sexy (with a little moan for dramatic effect), was the start of his illness, a growing wild inside him.

  “Let’s go,” Owen said to me.

  Even as Adam’s body was clumsy and slow from his new medications, his mind still understood Owen’s weaknesses.

  That was the first day, in the thirteen years I had known him, that Owen took my hand. We went to my apartment, where I kissed him over and over again, being careful of his neck.

  Adam disappeared two months after that.

  When our friends say they’ve seen Adam: with a drum, with a fifth of Crown, with a tiny white dog who sleeps curled behind his knees, Owen says no, he is gone.

  The Holographic Soul

  We do the psychic trick for the new boys in the neighborhood in Louisa Phelps’s backyard. It is the tipping point of June, the afternoon before the last day of school, and the heat has already settled in, bringing the bees, which buzz near our unshod toes. Louisa’s backyard is between the new boys’ and ours, and when our father looks at V and me sternly enough, we play over there, although it is clear Louisa doesn’t like either of us very much. But today she’s willing to play any game; the presence of new kids gives her a chance not to be despised and ignored as the ineffective tyrant she is.

  I am the transmitter, V is the receiver. Louisa, restrained in her better self, lets the boys be our subjects. Aaron, who will be in my class in the fall, cups his hands over my ear without actually touching it and whispers to me in a slow Midwestern accent. At the edge of the yard, my sister suspends herself by her knees from a low tree branch until we call her back to us.

  V arranges herself on the grass in between Aaron and his younger brother, Charlie, closing the circle we have created. She shuts her eyes, and then I shut mine, occasionally peeking through my eyelashes. Everyone giggles, then quiets. I can hear the boys breathing, leaning in, Louisa’s fingers tapping her sandals. We make them wait a good two minutes before I open my eyes and start to ask V questions.

  “Is it a loaf of bread?”

  “No.” V’s dark eyebrows furrow, two smudge marks of smoke.

  “Is it a school bus?”

  “No.”

  “A roller coaster?”

  V’s eyes roll around in her head, her hands rattle ever so slightly—a new touch. “Nuh-uh,” she says, letting disappointment cross her face.

  “A bookmark?”

  “Really now, Hannah. Concentrate, please.” V’s exasperation is part of the act.

  “A motorcycle?”

  “Nope.”

  “A banana split?”

  V licks her lips. “Yum. Yes.”

  The boys’ mouths open into skeptical o’s of disbelief. Their eyes narrow. They call us lucky. The three Yarrow girls come by with their little brother; Louisa’s sisters come home from high school. They make us prove ourselves again and again, have us switch roles, turn our backs on one another, be blindfolded with a scarf Louisa retrieves from her mother’s dresser drawer. They guess at tricks of counting, hand signals, a hidden mirror.

  “We’re just psychic,” says V.

  “No, you’re not,” says Louisa, standing. She tosses her doll-like corn-silk hair over her shoulder. She is a year older than I am, but I want to yank it. “You’re just liars.”

  V shrugs; I take a moment to pick the grass off my knees. We wouldn’t reveal our secret under torture, or call them jealous, though they must be; V and I are the only siblings in the neighborhood who don’t try to leave each other at home, or sacrifice each other during the backyard games that always end in someone else’s tears. V and I need only each other.

  Earlier today I looked in on V at school. We are just a grade apart, and because Mrs. Martin keeps her classroom door open, I can see V bent over her desk by the window whenever I pass through the fifth-grade hallway on my way to the bathroom, her misaligned grip on the pencil, her ponytail crooked and sinking with the weight of her hair. Finding my sister in the room has become a ritual for me, knowing she is okay, even though I have no reason to believe she isn’t. I will be across the street in junior high next year, and my last glance at V finds her as she always is, how I want her always to be in my mind.

  In Louisa’s yard, my little sister stands and points her chin up to meet Louisa’s glare. V smiles at her sadly, as if Louisa were the littlest kid there, the dumb one in the class. “We were born this way,” she says, and hooks her elbow through mine before we turn toward home.

  • • •

  Dad started running this spring. Every night at 5:45, four or five men gather by our house, which sits at a central corner in the neighborhood. The runs last till dinnertime, when each man splits off into his own driveway, nodding his good-bye. Afterward, our father stands in our kitchen proudly, his hair, dark and thick like ours, glistening with sweat. He picks out half-cooked vegetables from the skillet over our mother’s shoulder until she swats at him with a wooden spoon and tells him to shower already. She uses a tone not unlike the one she uses with us when we wait for attention too long.

  When we come home this evening, Mr. Keller is outside with Dad, both of them stretching against the yellow clapboard.

  “Well, well, well, if it isn’t the amazing Oliver sisters,” Mr. Keller says as we approach, and this lights us up, as if he knows what we have just been doing, as if he knows of our small triumph.

  “You girls meet the new boys yet?” Mr. Keller asks us. Then he leans into Dad, says, “Interesting guy. Hedge funds. Chicago,” and Dad raises his eyebrows in agreement.

  “Whaddaya think, Vanessa?” Mr. Keller bends down to V as though he were talking to the Litmans’ new puppy. “Think they’ll be okay? Should we let them in?” Our neighborhood is known for girls. Mr. Keller has four of them, all older; two were our babysitters till last year, when we were allowed to be at home by ourselves.

  Dad does an eye roll for our benefit behind Mr. Keller’s back.

  “Yeah, sure, whatever,” V says with a shrug. Her arm is still absently hooked through mine—she often forgets her limbs, as if they weren’t attached to her own body—and our shoulders lift together, conjoined twins.

  When Mr. Heineman and Mr. Phelps come, the men take off. We watch the pack of fathers disappearing down the road in their white T-shirts and blue shorts, an unacknowledged and accidental uniform, and after a few hundred yards it is hard to tell which one is ours.

  • • •

  Inside, a note on the kitchen table reads: Girls, At the grocery. If client comes early, stall.—M. My mother has the whole day to go to the supermarket, but she likes to go at five o’clock, to pull into a crowded parking lot with all the other people who’ve just remembered they have to cook dinner. She says that having to constantly move her cart out of the way keeps her in touch with the normal folks, but her face puckers on the word normal as though it were a joke.

  When asked, our mother will say she was a photojournalist, and pause b
efore tacking on a “once.” At those moments, my father will note that she takes stunning portraits, and my mother will make some huffing noise and mumble about famous people and their vanity. Now her work is mostly head shots. Even though she works from home, she’s always late for her appointments, no matter how famous the clients. “Another writer,” she remarked about tonight’s shoot to my father over the phone earlier, and then he said something that made her laugh.

  The writer knocks on our front door ten minutes early. I walk him back to the studio; V follows, jumping from stone to stone along the path that connects it to the house. The studio used to be the garage. My father had the renovations done two summers ago while my mother was on a monthlong assignment in Tel Aviv, her last travel assignment, and V and I were at sleepaway camp and hating it. He went a little overboard, installing revolving walls and electronic shades and built-in speakers. My mother is always losing the remotes for what she calls the “contraptions.” The back half of the studio is a darkroom, accessible through two sets of doors, each one triggering the lights on or off. We glow orange in there; V’s chunks of black hair become inkier, and her eyebrows stand out, like they might march right off her face. We are not allowed in much, partly because Mom doesn’t want us around the chemicals, which drip from the tongs and sinks, which she says will make her go mad, eventually, and partly because she says we get in her space—the darkroom’s built for one, my father will say, in a tone that is meant to soften the blow.

  The skylights are open in the studio today, and the floor blazes white beneath us. I lead the writer to a chair that looks out over the garden.

  “You two twins?” the writer asks me while V gets him a bottle of water from the mini-fridge.

  “No, I’m older,” I say.

  “I’m the older one, too,” he says, taking off his blazer and hanging it neatly over his chair. There are ovals of dampness under his arms. Besides this, he is sort of handsome for an older person, because he looks not unlike Indigo Roberts, in the seventh grade, how Indigo might look when he gets taller and starts to dress more seriously.

  “What’s your book about?” I ask, while V wanders the room poking at all the things Mom wouldn’t want her to touch.

  “Your mother and I have a lot in common, actually. I cover the same places in Africa she photographed for her book.”

  Before she met my father, before she had us, my mother published a book, a famous book, of photographs of children in Sudan. The Disinherited was published thirteen years ago, while my mother was pregnant with me.

  “She doesn’t really do that stuff anymore,” I tell him. She hasn’t taken a foreign assignment since the studio went up.

  “I see.” He smiles at me before screwing the cap back on the bottle after a gulp of water.

  “We’re psychic, you know,” V says, appearing suddenly between us.

  “Vanessa,” I warn. Usually we don’t offer the trick to adults—they all assume we’re lying, and so they fake belief; their playing along is worse than anything we could be accused of by our peers.

  “It’s true,” V says, lowering her voice. “Hannah’s just embarrassed. Doesn’t want us to get too in demand.”

  “You work as a team, huh?” He looks from her to me, his smile asking whether I am in on this game or not.

  I want to say no, but I can’t. I don’t know what has gotten into her; she stands with her hands on her hips, her face showing the same sense of victory Dad’s shows in the kitchen after his runs.

  “Oh yeah. You have to tell her something,” V says, indicating me with her head. “A word or a name or something. I’ll leave the room if you want.”

  I am saved by the sound of a car door closing.

  “That’s Mom,” I say.

  “Maybe another time,” he says, winking at me when V turns to look out the window to make sure.

  Our mother comes in full of apologies and smiles—when she wants, her face can make anyone feel loved, special. She hands V the car keys; it’s her week to unload the groceries. V groans but marches off to the car dutifully. When Mom goes to shake the writer’s hand, she looks old next to him; I realize they are different degrees of adult.

  “It’s such a pleasure to meet you,” the writer says, rising to greet her. “I’m a huge fan of your work.”

  “And you, Mr. Kingsley, as well. I’ve been following your series in the Times. I hear it’s been causing just the right amount of trouble.”

  “Call me Robert, please.” He watches Mom as she unpacks her equipment. “You’re very kind, as are your daughters. Vanessa was just telling me about their special ability.”

  My mother pauses in assembling a light kit behind him. “Oh, and what’s that?” She looks at me, a frozen smile masking a kind of worry.

  “Nothing, just a game.”

  She looks between us. “I hope they didn’t—”

  “No, no, they are lovely. Very hospitable,” he says, and winks at me again.

  “Why don’t you go help your sister unpack?” Mom says to me, her chin pointing me toward the doors. As I leave, she gives her hair a good shake before pulling it back into a fresh ponytail, as though she’s sliding off one face for another. She steps in front of the writer. “We ready?”

  • • •

  I have trouble falling asleep, and while V yelps in her sleep like a puppy, I slip out of our bedroom and into the hall. The stairs creak under my feet, but no one wakes, and I wander into the study, stand in front of the shelves that hold my mother’s collection of photography books. The Hollywood Starlets of the 1940s is my favorite—the old shots of Veronica Lake’s hair cascading over her right brow, a curtain behind which she hid. But tonight I reach for The Disinherited, which I haven’t looked through in years.

  My mother’s photographs of the orphans are in black and white, crisp and glowing at the edges with gray light. The orphans’ feet are bare and their eyes are bright against the blackness of their skin. When I was younger and home sick from school, Mom used to turn the pages with me, stroking my hair and telling me the boys’ names—Santino, Saloua, Maduk—but I’ve long since forgotten the stories she told me about each boy. She said then that the orphans project was what made her want to have children. When I touched the orphans’ faces in the book, I felt connected to them; I thought that this was somehow where we came from. I thought about how much luckier we were, V and I.

  But tonight I feel something else when I touch them. As the old clock in the study clicks over toward midnight, I think of the blush of Mr. Kingsley’s face when my mother complimented him, how they lingered after the appointment, talking in serious tones, his card between her solution-stained fingers. V and I were out in the yard, snipping basil for dinner, which Dad had started in the kitchen. V was going on about how Louisa made her blood boil, and didn’t notice a thing. I touch the orphans’ faces and think of my mother’s this afternoon—how for a moment when I saw her in the studio doorway, I didn’t recognize it. A pit opens in my stomach.

  • • •

  School ends on a half day. We have a party in our class, and the little kids watch our graduation ceremony—mock, since we are only moving to another building. At the end of the day, our knapsacks still hold the shape of our returned textbooks; we fill them with that year’s art and papers and walk home with their lightness at our backs.

  To celebrate, V and I decide to lie in the backyard in our bathing suits, our freshly washed beach towels side by side, but neither of us lasts very long. Bees collect on our sandwich crusts; it’s hot, our sprinkler is broken, and though Louisa’s might work, we don’t think we’d be welcome over there today, after the mind-reading business. We wander into the house in our suits, where our father is packing for a business trip to Brazil. My parents’ bedroom is shady and cool; we sit on the edge of the bed, next to the half-filled suitcase.

  “How long will you be gone?” I ask.<
br />
  “Two weeks.”

  “What are you going to do there this time?” V wants to know, as if we ever comprehend what he tells us about his work. An econ geek, our mother calls him, even though anyone can see it isn’t so; my father is so handsome, completely in command of himself.

  “You know, spying, drinking, the usual.”

  My father was an economist with the foreign service when he met my mother in Africa. After my parents had me, he left the service to work for a consulting firm. When we were kids, he told us he was a spy and swore us to secrecy.

  “Great,” says V, continuing their routine, “don’t forget to send a postcard.”

  “I won’t,” he says, ruffling her hair, perfectly earnest. He searches the room for the one thing he’s forgotten, but doesn’t find it. He shuts the case and kisses each of us good-bye, twice.

  • • •

  While our father’s plane hurtles toward Rio de Janeiro, my mother takes a series of calls on her studio phone, pacing the floor in bare feet and old jeans, while V and I wait for dinner; we always go out on the nights Dad leaves. We open the cabinets in search of something to snack on, but each door reveals disappointment: high-fiber cereal, enough cans of stewed tomatoes to drown the neighborhood, expired granola bars. My mother’s trips to the store are habitual, not necessary, and she forgets to check the inventory.

  At seven o’clock, V makes a sign that reads, WE’RE HUNGRY!!!!!! and holds it against the glass of the studio doors. Mom holds up two fingers and mouths “soon” to us. When she gets off the phone, she’s in such a good mood she lets us pick whatever restaurant we want for dinner.

  • • •

  Mom has her portfolio under her arm when she leaves for her appointment the next day. She puts ten dollars for lunch under our library cards. V is antsy and excited, which is odd, because she hates the library, hates to read or sit still. “You lead,” she says to me as we walk our bikes from the shed in the backyard, where we keep them. Usually she wants to lead, and we battle over the position for a few minutes, deliberately misremembering who was in charge of our route last time we went out. I pick the downhill routes for some breeze, but we are both sticky by the time we get there. Our black curls are too short to stay put behind the rubber bands of our ponytails; they drop sweat onto our foreheads.