Back Talk

by Danielle Lazarin

  The second time we were together I didn’t even need the whiskey. We didn’t bother flirting. Negotiations had ended when I sat on your couch a week before. In our five months together, I didn’t have to lie, not once. My best friend saw your picture on your website and called you yummy, made some comment about me running away with you that was so far from possible in her mind that I didn’t even blush as I made a bad joke about fucking you in paint.

  That first day you took me up to your studio above the gallery, flipping the sign on the door so that it read BACK IN A BIT, you showed me the paintings that weren’t for sale, the non-landscapes you said you were too afraid to market. You thought it might be confusing, and this is how you seemed to me, confused, even as you offered me a drink at two o’clock in the afternoon, as though it could mean anything else.

  I calculated the hours till I had to pick up the kids from practice and after-school, some play my daughter was in that I kept forgetting the name of. I had three hours to kill, enough time to drink a whiskey and be sober enough to drive to get them half an hour away. I have always said yes more than I’ve said no. You were the first person in days to talk to me like I was a human being. I liked you.

  I found this thing in my husband’s T-shirt drawer, a long scrap of fabric, black and shiny, frayed at its edges. The kind of thing you could use to tie someone up, or pull through your hands when you miss them. I held it up to my nose, but it didn’t smell like anything. It spanned the length of my arms. I had never seen it before, but we weren’t in the habit of being in each other’s things. I wanted it to mean something, something I didn’t know or understand—someone, I hoped. The longer I hold on to that hope, the more I know it’s nothing.

  I have no photos of you, though you tried, so many times, to get me to send you photos of myself, of my body half-dressed—the way you must think of me, I guess, dressing and undressing. I didn’t want to be careless, I said, but the truth is I didn’t want you to own any piece of me and, well, as for those paintings of yours I bought, I gave away every last one of them, and we both know that they aren’t as much a piece of you as the ones you won’t sell. Maybe one day I will buy one of those.

  And the most dangerous part of it all was not the drop into the river, not going into the woods with you alone, not how you held my hand when we walked the streets of a town where everyone knew you, but being on that ledge with a man I had no desire to understand at all. How little we cared to know each other, the protective distance we put between ourselves, filled with our bodies. Your skinny legs, my hair when it was long scattered in your sheets and no seduction in the daylight, not quite animal enough. Only now do I wonder what you were thinking, what put you on that ledge, what made you think to ask me, of all people, to go with you.

  Hide and Seek

  The children are outlining each other’s bodies with chalk in the driveway when their uncle’s car pulls in. Magnolia pops up from the asphalt as soon as the car door opens. Pale purple chalk dusts the crown of her brown wavy hair, and green marks the insides of her fingers. Seven years old, she still greets Nick with a full-body throttle, screaming his name as he gathers his things from the backseat: a light long-sleeved shirt to keep the mosquitoes away on the August evening, beer for himself and his sister, the bag of charcoal she asked him to pick up from the store.

  “Mag! I’m not done yet!” complains Sunshine, crouched before the misshapen, legless form her sister occupied a moment before.

  Magnolia accepts a kiss from Nick pressed onto her cheek.

  “Better get over there and finish what you started, huh? Hello, Sunny,” he calls to the older one. “Where’s your mom at?”

  Of all the things he has learned to accept about his sister’s life—her abandonment of Manhattan, her determination to raise her kids alone—the strange optimism of the girls’ names is still hard to swallow. Sunshine and Magnolia, like rescued dogs, like hippies. Alison’s the only one who insists on their full names; it’s only Sunny who corrects her mother’s introduction of her by it, for now.

  “Did I ask you not to do that in the driveway or what?” Alison’s voice comes from around the side of the house before she does. She gives Sunshine’s earlobe a playful tug. “Can you believe these two?” she asks Nick as she motions toward the backyard.

  The girls have switched places now, Sunshine holding the chalk hand of Magnolia’s two-dimensional self, whose head she has decorated with her name in hasty blue lettering.

  • • •

  Alison watches Nick make room for the beers among the hot dog packs and tubs of coleslaw in the fridge. Usually, after his shifts at the police station, he will pick up a six-pack for what she’s taken to calling their “bullshit in the backyard” sessions, but tonight he’s brought two.

  “Let’s go outside,” he says, uncapping their beers.

  They sit in the lawn chairs on the stone patio, looking out into the backyards that face Alison’s. There are no fences in this neighborhood, but the houses sit so deep back you’d need a megaphone for a neighbor to hear you. Out front, the girls take turns throwing a rubber ball against the garage door.

  “You need to mow your lawn,” Nick says. His fingers work the beer bottle’s label, the tiny bits of paper collecting on his shorts.

  He’s always on her about the upkeep on the house, a future problem he wonders if she’s considered, the unspoken worry about how she will pay for what hasn’t yet happened. Alison inherited the house from a great-aunt who gave a big screw-you to the rest of the family by leaving it to the distant niece who’d made all the questionable life choices. No one had imagined Alison would actually move the kids from Manhattan here, but she did. At least he’s dropped the idea of them moving back into the building their parents still own on West Fifty-sixth, where they grew up. She’s heard enough about how happy they’d be to take a hit on the market-rate rent to have her and the girls closer, as if the Bronx is another state.

  Nick’s never been good at hiding himself from his big sister. It’s not unusual for his mind to be elsewhere after a shift, but tonight he looks at her with a heaviness that she knows means something worse than a bad day at work. She wishes it were about some girl; it never is.

  “Nicholas,” she says, sternly, jokingly. “Out with it.” She doesn’t want to wait all night for bad news.

  “When the girls are asleep.”

  “Just say it.”

  He stands up and peeks down the side of the house that leads to the front, where the girls are shouting at each other about turns, on the verge of a fight. He sits back in the chair, puts his beer on the ground. “I got a call from downtown this morning. There was an incident a couple of days ago, on Twenty-first, by the river. Michael was stabbed.”

  “Oh?” Alison asks as if she hasn’t been listening, as if the utterance of the name she has forbidden in her house is just a coincidence.

  “He’s dead,” he says.

  Alison puts a hand over her lower stomach, but it doesn’t do anything to stop what feels like being on a tossing boat with the shore nowhere in sight.

  “Okay,” she says.

  Nick shifts his weight on the old metal patio chair, its creaking filling the silence between them. “It’s done, though. You don’t have to do anything,” he says after a bit.

  A door closes somewhere in the house; small feet pound the stairs.

  “Frank and Carrie?” Alison asks.

  Michael’s siblings, both of whom live crime-free, family-centered lives in Westchester, refused to come downtown, having, as Alison had, cut him off or lost him some time ago. Nick shakes his head.

  Alison said her good-bye to Michael at twenty-five, when she was pregnant with Magnolia, a decade of his quick and selfish choices behind her. She asked him to leave them alone, and he listened, the way he had when she’d said she wanted to get married, have babies. Some days, Magnolia will lift her arm a certain
way and Alison will lose her words, have to shake the image of his ghost, tamp down the fact of loving him, of having loved him, and of loving Magnolia now, in the moment of putting on her shirt or reaching for a light switch. She can’t control when she sees him—this will never die—but she is grateful that at least the girls will never know whom they’re tied to, that they belong to him, too. She will be the only one who knows the depth of that, who will see it. An apt punishment for the foolishness of her youth.

  “I wasn’t next of kin? For the body?”

  “You wouldn’t have wanted to do that,” Nick says.

  He’s right; she’s relieved to have been spared the question, but she won’t thank him for it. She stands, her now-empty bottle in her hands. “Want another one?”

  • • •

  The house is under-furnished and cavernous, too much space for a single mother and two little girls. While it would make sense for Alison to sell the house, to buy an apartment she could reasonably furnish, one in which when she calls her kids for dinner, her voice doesn’t echo, she likes the space, the anonymity after the thirty years she spent in the ten square blocks around where she grew up, a neighborhood so changed she didn’t even want to recognize it anymore. Besides, anyone who rents from her parents these days is as rich as any of her neighbors now. But here, they bring her things: handfuls of basil from their gardens, their children’s outgrown bicycles and clothing, and it does not feel as wrong as she imagined it would to be on that side of kindness.

  The girls love the emptiness of the house, the closets with one item in them, the crawl spaces just the right height for their toys, too obvious to hide in and too plentiful not to. It is in one of those spaces that Sunshine convinces Magnolia to hide that afternoon, a game of hide and seek only they know about.

  “Now don’t move or speak or leave till I come get you.” Sunshine secures her sister in the crawl space in a spare bedroom with bags of old stuffed animals, winter blankets, and extra pillows.

  “Did you pee?” she asks. It will be hours, the girls predict, before their mom and uncle find Magnolia, before they’ll even notice she’s gone. A length of time, when told to them, that usually seems interminable, but that now, from their lips, feels like a small victory over the grown-ups.

  Magnolia nods, wedging herself against the bags. Sunshine shoves her back with a palm.

  “No, in farther, so they can’t see you. You can’t be wiggling around when they come in. No jumping out when you hear their footsteps either. Got it?”

  “Can I have my snacks?”

  Sunshine hands over the package of graham crackers in their sleek, oily wax paper.

  “Don’t eat them all at once. You don’t know how long you’ll have to be in here.”

  “Okay.”

  Magnolia waits till her sister’s footsteps reach the bottom of the stairs before she opens her book, which she has squirreled away along with a flashlight, a drawing pad, and a pack of glitter pens on loan from Sunny. She doesn’t need to rid her mind of monsters and such; these are the innards of the closets, and she has hidden herself in every dark corner of the house, comfortable as in a womb.

  • • •

  Alison is reentering the yard with two fresh beers when Sunshine jogs past toward the swing set the neighborhood kids share, just beyond a row of hedges.

  “Hey, hey, where’s your sister?” Alison calls out after her. Magnolia is never but a few leg lengths behind.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Could you go get her? I’d like to put the food on soon.”

  Sunny makes a show of rolling her eyes, but runs back around the front of the house as she’s told.

  “I can’t find her,” she announces on her return a few minutes later.

  “Well, did you look?”

  “Yeah, I looked. I can’t find her.”

  Alison disappears into the shady insides of the house. She calls Magnolia’s name as she walks the hallways, making sure her footsteps are audible. She enters every room with a closet, where Magnolia has created small universes of toys—apartments, she calls them—and Alison figures that Sunshine was too lazy to look there. No answer from her younger daughter.

  “I can’t find her,” Alison says when she comes out to the yard again, her hands in the back pockets of her shorts.

  “You see?” Sunny says triumphantly, slumped in her mother’s patio chair, kicking the air.

  Alison ignores her, locks eyes with her brother, asking for his calm. She asks him to go down to the Cramers’, the yellow house at the end of the block. “They have these rabbits, and Mag is crazy about them. I’ll kill her, though.”

  Nick almost chuckles at the obviousness of his sister’s sending him away, but he’s in awe at her ability to put on a lying face when fear must be clawing her insides out. The providence of mothers. “Sure thing.”

  “I’ll go,” Sunny volunteers.

  “No, you stay here with me. You’ll never come back from bunny land.” She gathers Sunshine’s dirty blond hair into a ponytail around her finger, pulling her toward her, a quick measuring of her body against her own no one else would notice.

  She tells Nick to take the yard route while she takes another spin through the house. “And don’t pull any of that cop shit over there. It scares people,” she yells out after him.

  He puts his hand up in the air, a gesture of understanding.

  • • •

  The Cramers’ house is the final in a string of connected yards. The grass is still damp from some kid’s afternoon run through a sprinkler, mud beginning to return, refreshed, to the earth. Nick sees the rabbits huddled together in a pile in their cage: red wood and wire, a latched door the perfect size for a child’s arms to reach in and select a favorite furry friend, something someone’s father built. No sign of Mag.

  Nick makes himself unassuming (hand in his pocket, a smile that shows his single dimple) as he knocks on the screen door in back—no one in this neighborhood seems to use their front entrances, or lock the ones they do use. He talks briefly with the mother, who invites him in, who expresses alarm and pity just at the mention of his sister and nieces. While he talks with her, her boy, shirtless, the underpinnings of muscle and power in his long and tanned body, on the edge between childhood and puberty, watches him from a stool at the kitchen counter. Nick remembers such boys from his own childhood—the ones who never had to lay a finger on another kid, who ran the neighborhood with their voices or a shift of their eyes. Boys like Michael, though Nick knows that the likelihood of this kid ending up enthralled by the hustle of New York is slim; he is more likely to be taken in by banking or real estate than petty fraud or apartment burglary.

  “Should we call the police?” the mother asks, and Nick assures her there is no need, without telling her what he does.

  She promises to send Magnolia back if she spots her. He thanks her and waves good-bye to the boy, who, sitting quietly on his stool, makes no indication that he has seen him at all.

  “She’ll turn up,” the mother says as Nick walks away.

  • • •

  On domestic violence calls or at car accidents, Nick is always handed babies, and they like him, like his smooth, symmetrical face, his wide, firm chest; a child who doesn’t know him will stay in his arms as long as he needs it to. He tries, always, to be sweet in front of his nieces, even as they view him with the same indifference as they do most adults—sometimes nice, but all in all disposable. Mag shows him more affection than Sunny, occasionally sitting on his lap or reaching for his hand to hold, only to wiggle out or let go after a couple of minutes, as if she has made a mistake. Sunshine is wary of men altogether; she keeps her distance. Nick remembers when she fell asleep in the backseat of his car on the way home from Thanksgiving last year. He carefully slid his hands under her thighs to carry her into the house, but this only woke her, and her brow crump
led into anger as she moved his hand aside.

  “I can go,” she said, not pausing to rub her eyes, looking at him hard and unchildlike. He moved out of her way as she got out of the car, slamming her own door behind her.

  So when Nick comes around the side of the house to find a young man crouching to inspect Sunny’s necklace in the yard, he isn’t sure if it’s his growing concern about where Mag is that causes the worry about the boy’s hands at Sunny’s neck, to read into how easily, her chin up, hands on her hips, she is making space for him. Nick waits in the parting of the hedges that leads to the yards beyond his sister’s, thinking what best to do, reaching for his logical, alert cop self. The boy is probably a neighbor.

  The boy cups the gold charm at the end of the chain in his hand, asking Sunny a question that Nick can’t hear clearly. Then a storm passes across his niece’s face, a look of betrayal and distrust so intense that Nick wastes no time leaping onto the boy.

  Nick pins him in seconds, the boy’s thin body not even struggling under the weight of Nick’s knees, which he uses to secure the boy to the ground. Sunny stands eye-to-eye with her uncle now, her hands moving to her neck, a red slash of irritation along its right side, where her necklace was a moment ago.

  “Scream for your mother,” Nick tells her.

  Sunny picks up her necklace from the grass, which lies a couple of inches from the boy’s contorted face. The necklace once belonged to the great-aunt who owned the house; a medallion with a lion, the astrological sign she shared with Sunny, hung from its center. Her mother kept it stored away till this last birthday, Sunshine’s tenth, two weeks earlier.

  “Go get her, Sunny. Now.”