The Listeners

by Leni Zumas

  Meli banged open the screen door and announced: “A girl got saved by lions. This girl in Ethiopia—listen, Mom—she was kidnapped and then but lions came and guarded—you’re not listening.”

  “Now I am. Where did you hear this…?”

  “TV. The girl was kidnapped to get married even though she was only twelve. Some evil men kept her for a week in the Ethiopian countryside and were hitting her and the way she cried sounded like a baby lion cub, so lions found her, and they scared away the men, and they stood in a circle around the girl for a long time until the police came. Isn’t that so good, Mom?”

  Mink agreed that it was.

  “I love lions. They are incredibly smart. Do you love them, Quinn?”

  “Well, sure,” I said.

  “In America,” she added, “it would be done by wolves, since no lions are on this continent.”

  “What about bears?” said Mink.

  “Maybe, but definitely wolves. The pack would encircle me until you got there. And one little wolf would be away from the pack being lonely until I talked to it and then it would go back to the circle and be okay.”

  She had come out of Mink’s body. This person with her own curiosity—she had pushed blood-wet into the oxygen, made of pipes and wires, hinges and holes.

  EDINBURGH LANE WAS a prewar house that didn’t have air-conditioning.

  “I’m all sweaty,” I said. “I can’t get comfortable.”

  “Once you’re asleep, you won’t notice,” Fod said.

  I wore just underwear. My sister and I got to be on the sunporch, where it was more outside, because our room upstairs was hottest. Our brother could hear us down there, through the floor. Not separate words but the voices, fighting. Crickets were scrizzing so loud it got in the way. Then she laughed, and I laughed. But after a while the fight voices started again.

  Was she still mad when she went to sleep? No—she had been laughing. We were so sweaty we had to laugh. She was happy there was no school the next day. She fell asleep smiling. No, that’s not true. I called her whiny little bitch and she turned away, shoulder in the air, on the squeaky sleeper-couch mattress. Stop pinching me I want to sleep. But she turned back again, before sleep. And did she smile? Yes she smiled. We were laughing. There was no school the next day.

  In the morning, Riley craned on his toes to see inside the batter bowl. “What kind what kind—”

  “Settle down,” Mert said, “they’re raisin.”

  Raisin was so boring.

  “Go wake the big ones,” she told Riley, “it’s almost nine.”

  “They’re being lazy,” Riley said, hoping Mert would add something critical about us but she said nothing, went on stirring, reached to adjust the blue flame. Riley sniffed at the butter about to melt: angels’ blood.

  “Go on,” our mother said.

  We were still lazing. Two sheeted lumps on the porch bed. Riley yelled a magic yell that sometimes worked with my sister because she sometimes knew things before Riley said them. I didn’t. It was because, she said, I had a dwarfed attention span. She was writing a story called “The Girl Too Poor to Pay Attention”; she had shown the first page to us. The girl was beautiful yet crippled from a Ferris wheel accident, which meant she couldn’t work and had no money to pay the weekly attention.

  “Guys,” Riley said, “it’s pancakes.” He hit my legs, and I grunted; he leaned onto her legs to poke the feet. They didn’t move. He poked again. Couldn’t tell if she was faking; her face was hidden by the sheet.

  “Tickle,” I advised.

  “Okay I’ll be lieutenant.” The lieutenant was responsible for holding down the victim while the captain tickled.

  “Okay go!”

  Riley pulled the sheet off our sister and it was all red, red, red, everywhere, like a smashed sun.

  So will you switch places now? Okay, but only this one time.

  “Did you wake them?” said our mother.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “She won’t get up,” said Riley.

  “Which one?”

  “She has her period.”

  Mert swung around from the stove, her mitted hand on the skillet.

  “And it’s all over everything.”

  Mert set the skillet down. “What are you talking about?” She jumped forward and was gone. Riley picked up the red mitt from the linoleum. He would be helpful by putting it back on the counter, safely far from the flame.

  Our mother came in saying, “I’ll get her up, if you two can’t . . . ”

  Then she yelled.

  Then she fell.

  “Mert,” Riley said, “wake up.” He pulled at her shoulders. When she saw Riley’s hovering face, she started to yell again. Riley decided we must leave the porch at once to save Mert’s eyeballs from the sight of her red daughter. “Let’s,” he said.

  I was pressed to the fly-stuck screen, my white stomach with its furry black line heaving, underwear bunched at the tops of my thighs.

  Riley said, “Let’s.”

  I wanted to move. Nobody did. The air was going black and sweet—blacker and sweeter the longer we stood there—as the raisin pancakes burned away in the kitchen. It seemed impossible that a thing that had started before our mother knew her daughter was dead could still be happening after. The pancakes went on. They blackened blacker. I saw Riley’s face twitch at the stink.

  I RANG MY brother’s bell, thinking to take him out to dinner, or at least to eat with him a dinner whose check we would split. I found him at tea with the limey. They were working with actual teacups. There was even a plate of what appeared to be scones; I picked one up.

  “Help yourself,” remarked Pine.

  Riley, I noticed, had done something new to his mane. A product had been used: pomade? brilliantine? The straight fawn hairs, which normally fell in a hush, were clumpy and darker—almost bonafide spruce.

  “Pine baked those,” he said of the lemony charm in my mouth.

  “You’re a good cook,” I said, knuckling crumbs off my lip.

  Riley asked her, “Have you had a chance to talk to the intern yet? I forget his name.”

  “Blaze,” Pine supplied.

  “Is he, like, smart at all?”

  “Don’t know,” said Pine, “but I do know that he suffers from halitosis.”

  “Do you, um, think he’s attractive?”

  Pine shrugged, reaching for the teapot. “If you like the dumb good health of a wheat thresher.”

  My brother looked so relieved I was embarrassed. I hoped Pine was flattered. Riley was kind of a plonker, but he was true. You got what you saw. Pine herself was off enough that perhaps it would be a heavenly match. She looked Riley’s age, even though she talked like an elderly. I pictured her hometown as a hutted hamlet in stony green countryside, sheep agraze on every hill; her parents kept a shop; her childhood had been unspectacularly lonely.

  Would our sister have smelled it on Riley, this oil of terrified desire? She had been able to smell in a classroom on test day the dread seeping off the students who hadn’t studied. I had walked unprepared into my honors English final and quietly sniffed my armpit, but the sweat was gray-pink, as usual.

  I went to pee, and when I returned, Riley was regaling Pine with the story of the ides of February. “The festival started,” he said, “with the sacrifice of two male goats and a dog. Then two young priests were anointed upon the altar with the sacrificial blood, and the red knife was wiped with milk-soaked wool. Afterward was a feast, during which the Luperci priests (that means ‘brothers of the wolf’) cut thongs (which were called februa) from the carcasses of the sacrificed animals and, draped in goatskins, ran around the old city wielding the thongs. Girls and young women lined up to be lashed. Lashing was supposed to prevent sterility, ensure fertility, and ease childbirth pain.”

  “Sounds flipping terrible,” Pine said.

  “But it’s cool, kind of…?”

  She shrugged—“I am a sheltered village chi
ld”—and stood up, put a hand on my brother’s shoulder. “Thank you for the tea. See you in the bunker tomorrow. Maybe the Afghan for lunch?”

  While Riley saw her to the door, I finished the scone he must have been too nervous to eat. He got busy with the dishes. I was impressed all over again, from the back, by his hair. Dishes racked, he wiped down the table, cab-ineted the Lapsang souchong box, and lathered his pale hands with cucumber soap from a push-down dispenser.

  “Want to grab some dinner?” I said.

  He dried his hands on a towel embroidered with avocadoes. “We just ate.”

  “Yeah, but scones don’t count.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Okay, cool.” But I didn’t want to go. “Then I’ll see you—soon?”

  “Soon,” he agreed, walking me to the door.

  On my flat bed, I lay in nobody’s arms. If an arm had been here, where would it have gone? Under my neck, like this; around my waist, like that. Up from the fog shot a high-school phrase: Should we be quieter?—Cam nodding at the ceiling, where my parents were. No, it’s fine, they can’t hear us. His self-consciousness had disappointed me. Such a tepid, piffling worry. But what if we—But what if you—Then I’ll get it sucked out, I said. (Relief face.) Or I’ll have it, and we’ll buy an aerodynamic stroller. (Alarm face.) Don’t joke about that! He had feared the most obvious threats. The only not-predictable thing was his clean skin. Not a single drop of ornament. It had made him stand out in a land of painted people.

  My hands moved south, skimming acorn nipples, dough stomach. Back up to the padded shoulders, which used to feel knobbly. Down again to the thighs: one of these was nearly two of its former self. I’d had legs the width of icicles; my belly had sloped inward and could hold a boy’s head; my hips had been holes for berries of bone.

  “BUT IT’S JUST her period,” Riley said. “Don’t worry.”

  “No no no,” said our mother.

  “It’s just she bleeds every month.”

  “Shut up,” said Mert. “Shut up.”

  “But—”

  “Shut up!”

  Riley put a fist to his mouth.

  Mert said, high-voiced, “It’s not her period.”

  “She isn’t dead!” shrieked Riley.

  “Shut up,” she said.

  “She just forgot to wear a pad.”

  “Goddammit, Riley!”

  “No, but she’s—”

  “Make him shut up,” Mert wailed.

  “Come here, Coyote,” I said and crushed his face to my chest. “Be quiet, okay?”

  “But she’s not,” said Riley into the bang of my heart. “I need to go check if she’s still having her period.”

  I put my palm on his head. “No, stay here.” His hair felt hot, like at the beach.

  Mert dialed, then stared at the receiver. “You,” she sputtered.

  I took the phone. At my father’s friendly “Yello?” I started to cry.

  “Pettle? What’s wrong?”

  “Um, Fod?”

  “What happened? Where’s your mother?”

  I pushed the receiver back at Mert, who told him to come home.

  There was nothing to do. The police wouldn’t let anyone on the sunporch. When Riley cuddled against me, his arm was so warm I wanted to shove it away; I was too sweaty myself to stand getting sweated on; but I was supposed to protect him. I couldn’t protect, but I could let him press himself to me, soft in his T-shirt. Neither of us cried but Mert was crying and walking around and I prayed for Fod to hurry the fuck back from campus.

  The worm nibbles the prisoner.

  The worm carries my sister’s eye in its mouth.

  A piece of red was blackening on my elbow.

  Fod got there after the ambulance, which was still parked out front since there was no hurry. A detective had come too, and other people—I didn’t know what they did—who were looking around on the porch. Mert wouldn’t let them interview us, so Riley and I were just sitting on the couch when Fod ran through the front door shouting “What? What is it?” He stood with his hands out in front of him. “Where’s your mother?”

  Riley said: “My sister died.”

  “Don’t joke about that. Where’s your mother?”

  “No, she did.”

  I shoved my palms into my eyes.

  Fod said, “What the hell is going on here?” and ran to the kitchen.

  SAW THE GHOST again. She was my sister’s face, full of eyes. Not threat but not friend either. She was sizing up. Seeing what has become of me. And not snow, worse than snow, a kind of knifey rain. We could barely drive this morning. Stopped at gas station to fix wipers. Whose magnificent idea was it to book the Midwest in the middle of winter? said C and I whose idea (as he well knew) it was said Next time feel free to do all the booking yourself! and he wants me to tell him again why I got rid of Seven because if we had a manager we wouldn’t be on this fucked route and I remind him for thousandth time that Seven was a thief and did he want a thief booking our shows? and C goes: If he sent us to Florida, then yes.

  IN A TRIBE, you knew your place. You knew you’d be taken care of, no matter what the weather. There was no lighting out for the territory, no lonely-hero journey into the abyss; the tribe enfolded you, smothering or comforting but always a net. In a tribe your worth was measured by connection—what you contributed to the whole—rather than by solitary achievement. You were judged as part of. No spotlights had trained white stares on me alone; their bodies had always been looked at, too. When we played in the mountains of the West, the air was so dry we dug fingernails into our nose walls to dislodge the solid cakes and blew red bits into napkins. The lack of oxygen made me sing better, because my voice didn’t need to try so hard. I didn’t drink my lemon that night, or the second night, or the third when we came down from the mountains onto a thousand-mile highway that rode through nothing. What mountains: Colorado? New Mexico? Some far place where folk called red and green salsa together Christmas and smiled at you for no reason. In the steep altitude my pens had burst, so I fingerprinted Cam’s and Geck’s faces and would have done Mink’s too but she said, “Do you know how hard I work to keep toxins away from my skin?”

  Like having a family better than the one you were born with. I had felt protected in their midst, not because any one of us was especially brave but because together, somehow—if we were together—we would always be okay. Calamity or curse might befall us, but no one would be lost.

  Tribeless, I prepared my face for the day, and my mood happened to be good. In the toothpaste-crusted mirror my eyes looked less baggy than usual; the hike to the subway felt just one minute long; the toast in my hand was delicious. Hot blue wind, clean sky, everything beleafed a silver-green—not a bad morning to be ankling the earth. On the train I stared at the kids with white veins dangling from their ears, sending brain juice to jacket pockets. Cups tucked into the pockets—slender, flat cups—collected the juice, saved it for later. A bonny boy noticed me (repeated head adjustments across the plastic aisle) and I was proud of myself for not being too pitifully glad about it.

  It would be a good day—it would.

  Up the bleached concrete trail from the subway station, up the little slope. I’d buy Ajax lunch and tell him to pack it in early, go fetch his monsters from day care.

  “How many cocoa patties will you desire today?” I yelled back to the office.

  “No, man, I’m…”

  “What’s that?”

  “I said no thanks.”

  “But, my treat!”

  Ajax emerged, staring at his hand. “Got something to discuss.”

  The sign on the door hadn’t been turned to OPEN, though it was quarter past. He leaned his elbows on the counter and opened his palm: the wooden ear-arrow, dark with blood. I looked up at his torn lobe. A second before he said the words, I heard them, so that the sentence felt like echo: “We have to close the store.”

  “Oh, crap—” I reached for my pack.

&
nbsp; “I’m gonna file for Chapter 7. Man, I’m sorry, I waited long as possible to tell you, thought it might not happen, some kind of miracle would—”

  “Maybe my parents can loan us some,” I said.

  “Yeah, they really have that kind of cash. Mine don’t either.”

  Scraping the match, I noticed, as if from a great distance, that my thumb was shaking. “How long more will we—”

  “Not long.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Nobody’s fault,” Ajax said.

  SHE HAD BLED all over herself. Blood fell out in the night. Dumb sister you didn’t bandage it up. It goes between your legs and the sheet is red forever and you could’ve gotten blood on me and you did—a little patch.

  Our mother said, “Oh Christ” and I looked where she was looking, at my elbow, and licked my thumb but Mert shouted, “Leave it!”

  I had my sister on me.

  She had her period all over herself, and had gotten some on my elbow.

  “It’s from between her legs,” Riley said, and our father took his cheeks in his fingers, hard.

  “Don’t Fod I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  Mert said, “Not from there, baby—from her head.”

  My sister could smell in a girl’s mouth if she was bleeding.

  The police took the sheets and the pillow. T-shirt and underwear would be cut from her body later. They strung yellow tape around the porch and said to keep away.

  “But we have to clean that floor,” Mert said.

  “No, ma’am, please don’t clean anything.”

  “But the floor,” she said.

  The detective nodded. “I know, ma’am. There’ll be plenty of time to clean it, but please, not yet. Forensics team still needs to get in there.” Puffs of skin were darkening under his eyes. He would be back, he told my parents. “Please try to get some rest.”