by Noley Reid
“Fine,” I say, “you can go if you want.” She won’t. I know she won’t.
Vivvy lets go of my arm and teeters in her yellow shoes but then she gets going, sort of shuffling her steps along, her arms out at her sides. She’ll come back, though. She’s just teasing.
I watch her.
She gets all the way to the corner and stands underneath the stop sign. She grabs hold of its pole, turns around to see me, and motions for me to come with her.
I shake my head.
Vivvy crosses the street. It takes her about five times longer than a normal person and about three times longer than when we hold on to each other. Once she gets to the other side, though, she doesn’t look back. She keeps on going.
“Wait!” I call after her and we head home.
Now we’re trying to figure out how to walk up the gravel of our driveway. Crab walk sideways on all fours—or all threes for me—and I figure it out. Going backwards works best, so Vivvy copies me and we get to the screened porch.
“Hey,” she says. She reaches out to me for balance but is close enough she pinches my twist of skin. She’s looking back at the driveway and now I see it, too. The driveway is still empty.
We go inside, clomp up into the kitchen from the porch.
“Dad?” says Vivvy but in her usual voice, not like she needs to find someone.
“No one is here,” I say.
“Not even Floey.”
I see the countertop first. “Look!” Two stormtrooper costumes in boxes, with plastic masks and smocks that tie up the back. They’re wonderful, except that they should have hair because I’ve always said I want the kind of costume with molded hair that is smooth and perfectly beautiful. I tear the soft cardboard of my costume’s box trying to get it open.
“So cool,” says Vivvy. She’s already slipping on her smock and tying the strings behind her neck and waist. “You should put that in a sock.”
She means my hand. So I slide my smock up my arms and we grab our pumpkin candy buckets and click-clack and rustle-rustle upstairs. I go into Daddy’s sock drawer and take one of his thickest ones. It’s navy blue and itchy but I put that over the gauze.
“Tie my strings,” I say.
She comes to where I am in their room and messes with them. She yanks on the smock.
“Don’t wreck it,” I say.
“They don’t reach.”
“Don’t be mean, Vivvy.”
“For real.”
Vivvy opens Ma’s desk drawer and staples the ties together at their very ends so the smock will close. I stand in front of Ma and Daddy’s mirror. The picture of the stormtrooper kind of sucks in and out of my folds down my front just a little bit. I slip the mask on over my clothespins, get the elastic over my ears, and line up the eyeholes and mouth. It’s perfect. I could be anyone now and no one would know.
I follow Vivvy to our room. She stops at Shelly’s door hanging broken and open. “Whoa,” is all she says and she keeps walking.
“Daddy did it.”
I sit on my bed. Vivvy clambers up the ladder to hers.
I touch the candy in my jack-o’-lantern, the M&M’s and Baby Ruth. “Are you going to eat yours now?” I say, rustling the wrappers with my hand.
“Mom’s not here. You better eat them while you still can.” Vivvy takes off Ma’s scarf from over her bouffy hairdo. It looks as good as when she first made it.
“I don’t want them,” I say.
“Me neither,” says Vivvy. “If Shell were still here, Mom would have banned Halloween by now.”
“Hasn’t she?” I say. I sit on my bed and turn to the wall, tuck my fingers up into the space between the wall and Vivvy’s bunk. “Do you miss him?”
“I don’t even remember him.”
I lie down.
In a minute, Vivvy peeks over the edge of her bunk and she’s upside down, her ponytail dangling like she’s hanging from our tree. “You’re keeping on your mask?” she asks.
I nod. “Dad would say the mouth hole’s perfect for M&M’s.” I stick a finger through the hole and bite the tip.
She looks back a second later and she’s in her mask. “Why do you think Ma got us all this stuff?” asks Vivvy.
“To make us like her?” I say. I lift my right arm up over my head and prop my sock hand on the pillow just in case.
“Maybe,” says Vivvy. “Fat like her.”
“She knew we were gonna dress up like her tonight.”
“Nuh-unh! There’s no way.”
“That’s why she hugged us and said we’d be pretty.”
Vivvy is quiet.
We lie in the quiet of nighttime dark without dogs, without parents, and without a brother still.
•
I wake. It’s still nighttime. I touch my face to see the mask hasn’t come off.
“Vivvy,” I call. “Look at my hand.” The gauze bandage glows in the dark of our hallway. And when I turn it palm side up, there is no more blood. Like it’s all soaked back into my hand while I slept. “Look,” I say, holding it out to her.
“What?” she says. She lifts her head a second. “Be healed, child!” says Vivvy loud and silly like a TV preacher. “A miracle of the blood!”
“It’s a miracle!” I say.
“It’s a miracle. Woo woo woo woo!”
“Could have been Daddy, I guess.”
“Or Mom.”
“I don’t think so.” I try to picture Ma sneaking in to change my bandage. I can’t see it—can’t see her sitting next to me on my bunk, the warm steam of her breath falling around me, and her peeling up the tape of the old one and replacing one so clean and perfect. Her doing it so soft I don’t even wake.
“I wore my shoes to bed, did you?” says Vivvy. She pulls one leg out from under the sheet. Dangling from her toes is one of Ma’s yellow high heels. As dark as it is, though, I can see the difference in what they were when we found them and what they are now: black scuffs and peeled leather.
“When Ma sees those, you’re dead,” I say.
“I’ll just tell her you wore them.”
“That’s not—”
“Joking! Just joking.” She pulls her leg back under the covers, shoe and all.
I get up, all rustly in the plastic smock. I step into my silver heels and clomp back to bed. “It still could have been Daddy,” I say.
“Could have been Mom.” She laughs softly so I laugh softly.
“Could have been Ma,” I repeat.
Vivvy giggles. “It’s a miracle!” she whispers.
I touch the gauze. It’s dry. It isn’t just a fresh layer taped over the old one. “Could have been Holly,” I whisper and feel myself drift.
32
Tate
The decision not to drive to Boone, not to follow Francie, is made before I even see the dogs. I don’t know when or if I ever intended to follow her again, actually, but all the way down on Main Street, loping through yards and even our dentist’s parking lot, are the dogs. I pull over, push my seat forward, and call to them: “Floey! The new dog!”
I get some hoots from kids in the back of a pickup truck passing by, but the dogs, the dogs are amazing, textbook even. Floey perks her ears. She turns her head and the new dog sees me clearly and they both, free of any oncoming cars, bolt to me. Right into the backseat they go. I keep on Main and head around back to knock at the kitchen door at Carol Lee. It’s cool out but I roll all the windows halfway down for the dogs anyway.
Holly comes eventually, wiping her hands in her apron. She opens the door a few inches, just enough for her face, says, “I’m not letting you in unless you can tell me Enid’s hand is not spurting blood and that you’ve verified this fact with your own eyes.”
“Let me in!” I beg. “It isn’t, I swear.”
So she steps back and I come in. She locks the door behind us and I follow her skirt back to the work area.
“She and Vivvy are zonked,” I say. “They must have walked the entire Blacksburg grid. D
o you know they’re in their bunks right now, wearing their costumes—masks and all.”
“Sleeping in them? What did you get them?”
“Stormtroopers.”
“Really?” She’s not impressed.
“I know, but it was all that was left. Truly.”
“Masks and all,” says Holly.
“I took pictures. But without flash it probably won’t show much.”
“So,” she says, “the hand?”
“I changed the dressing. It’s healing already.”
Holly resumes the many processes of her second shift. I bask in the warmth of the ovens, fryers, and rising drawers, the sweet moist smell of sugar melting, crystallizing, and remelting.
“Like I said, she was asleep but I needed to get in there and look at it.” I wink at Holly. “She was actually wearing one of my socks over the hand and had it up over her head, propped in her pillow, just like you hung it for her in your braid.” I look to that spot in her hair.
Holly smiles and shows off the braid by letting it swing around her shoulder to rest down her front.
“Go on,” she says.
“So I took off the sock and cut off your wrap. The bite wasn’t even bleeding anymore. I rewrapped it with care.”
“You’re certain.”
“Positive.”
“Yay,” says Holly with her hands in two happy little riotous fists.
We stand on either side of the long metal worktable.
She is flirting with me, throwing her twists higher. She flings a long piece of dough in the air and with a single flick of both wrists the dough comes down to the tray, halved and twisted. These will rise again then fry, be painted with cinnamon then go under the glaze drizzler. I can always tell Holly’s handmades from Diane’s or Sheila’s, whose are always uniform. Holly’s are artistic, interpretive.
She places the twist she’s just shaped and waits a moment before lifting the next length of dough, holding her hands up in front of her like the surgeons of M*A*S*H. “Tate,” she says, looking directly at me and not surrendering the gaze. “What are you doing here?”
“I never expected to need or want to tell you this. Jesus, Holly, I thought you would tire of the novelty of dating your professor much sooner than now.”
“Tate, you broke up with me like twelve weeks ago. And right now feels like the second time you’ve broken up with me today. You can stop, please. I know you’ve made your choice. Please don’t think you need to explain anything more to me. That just kind of makes it hurt more.”
“You asked me what’s wrong—with me, with her, Francie. The answer is the same. But I couldn’t tell you. He wasn’t your son, you aren’t a mother.”
“I’m a human being,” she says, “but if you don’t trust I’ll feel the right way about it, the right kind of sadness, then by all means keep it to yourself.”
My eyes tear up all at once, spill wet and warm on my cheeks and beard. I tell her everything.
“When a child dies, all the papers cover it. They call it a story. They don’t say everything but the university runs pictures of Francie’s car and the gravel. The Roanoke Times sends someone to the house. The sun is in the trees and I sit reliving the answers to the shit reporter’s questions. Some other grown kid knocks at the door; there is a rental on our block, a slim white house used by three to four students any given term. It is devoid of plantings, all visible upkeep—not even a sidewalk or path to the front door exists through its brambly front yard. So I think maybe, maybe this is one of its tenants come to ask for sugar.
“He asks where I was in the house, what I heard or felt or knew. He says, ‘Sheldon, what an unusual name these days; was it a family name?’ No, no tale to tell. Maybe we just liked the name, or maybe Francie decided and that was that. They ask to meet the girls but I say they’re napping. They are five and three—no, two and a half—after all. Our entire conversation occurs on the front steps of the house. He looks over at the driveway. We buried him two days ago. Francie took him to Boone.”
Holly reaches for both of my hands. She turns their palms to the light above this table. She brushes her own, dusty and white, against them, replacing my flour with hers and her flour with mine. She lays her hands out flat upon mine and in the silken wells of flour and sugar grit, we curl our fingers around each other’s thumbs and hold on to each other.
“In the first year, at every neighborhood block party, faculty reception, and parent-teacher night, conversation stopped dead when I walked in. If the girls were with me, Vivvy was admired, Enid’s lingering baby cheeks squeezed. Francie never left the house except to exercise-shop.” I mimic her like an aerobicizing robot skimming the cereal aisle for puffed wheat.
Holly giggles but we both fall quiet. She stands up a bit so I do the same. She pats her hands against her apron, sending up clouds of flour.
“Holly,” I say, touching her cheek, her chin. My hand leaves a fine dusting of flour over her freckles so I rub to uncover them again. “Holly. Francie is gone. She had to go. Instead of chasing me out this time, she chased herself away. It’s what she’s always wanted, anyway. What she has always needed, I guess, and she’s given it to the girls now, finally.”
Holly looks up. “She’s gone?”
“She’s gone home. To her home at her dad’s and with Shell. I don’t expect she can come back from that again—I guess she never really did.”
“I don’t know what to think,” Holly says, shifting her weight. “Why now? It’s been years.”
“I don’t want this life with her and I don’t want my old life with her. All her rules and upsets. I want my girls and to be allowed to walk into my son’s room if I want to and to be allowed to say his name. I want my family, my whole family. Come here,” I say, turning Holly to face me again, embracing her fully. I take hold of her braid a few inches below her neck. I grip the sturdy girth of it firmly, channeling all of what I want from Holly into my fist. “Can I kiss you?” I say, breathy and as ridiculous as a teenager.
“Yes,” she whispers followed by a quick “No.” She looks down and shakes her head. “No.” Still, she slides an arm up my chest, its hand in my hair, finger and thumb squeezing my earlobe, touching my neck. “Not tonight,” she says.
And she’s right. That tonight doesn’t mean anything for Holly. And it certainly doesn’t make us any more viable.
Yet we hold together that much longer.
“Wait here,” she tells me and when she returns it is with one of the pink cake boxes Enid covets whenever we come in here. Holly lifts the lid so I peek in. She playfully brings it down quick on my nose and fingers.
“Oh, okay,” she says, now grinning, “you may look.”
Inside are about a dozen of the most pristine and fresh chocolate-peanut, glazed, cake, cinnamon-sugar cake, blueberry cake, custard-filled, and chocolate raised doughnuts.
“The case is going to be light tomorrow,” I say. “What will Diane say in the morning?”
“I made extra. And I can make more.”
She slides things around, slips two special doughnuts, in the shapes of an E and a V, into the box, and tapes it shut. “Breakfast tomorrow.” She leads me to the door, unlocks it, and hands me the box. Now she kisses my cheek and pushes me out the door. “Tell Enid the chocolate-peanut is for her,” she says and pulls the door shut behind me.
“She’ll be over the moon,” I say. “Lock up.” I motion a key turning and she turns the lock.
So I get in my car, wake the dogs up, and we drive on home. A block or so away, a thought comes to me: What if Francie is there? What if everything I told Holly was wrong?
I cut the lights coming up the driveway, aware now of the possum hanging in plain sight all these evenings.
The driveway is all mine. I get out and flip the seat back and the new dog is first out. Floey hops down, too. We go into the porch and I unlock the kitchen door.
“Daddy!”
I open the door and there is a little stormtrooper in
her mother’s high heels.
“New dog! You found the new dog!” Enid runs to him in her plastic costume with its apparently stapled ties, and throws herself on him. He gets his nose up behind the mask and nudges it around to the other side of her head so he can lick her up the front of her face like a lollipop, from the base of her neck to the top of her hairline.
“You better watch out, Enid, or he’ll find out how many licks to the center of your Tootsie Pop.”
But she is crying now, sobbing into the new dog’s fur.
“What is it, baby girl?”
She hugs him tightly around his neck. “The whole trouble is that you should have a name,” she cries to him. She scoots herself around to the front of him and looks face to face, eye to eye. “Lowell. That’s your new name.”
“Hey, uh . . . should we maybe the three of us talk about that, Enid?” I say. But she stops crying, wipes her eyes, and replaces the mask, so who am I to care if we have a dog named Lowell?
“Lowell, come over here,” she says, clomping toward the sink, and he follows her. Not so much for the name, which he’s never heard before, but for love of her. “Come over here now, Lowell.” She crosses back to me and the countertop.
She sees Floey’s fairy wings and picks them up but there’s something else beneath them. A new set of small yellow wings.
Enid squeals. She holds the dog in place while wrestling the wings to his back. He takes a couple of steps away from us, then sits. The wings pleat and fold together down his back. Francie has actually finished something and managed to articulate this pair such that now when he trots in a small circle, the yellow wings open and shut.
“He’s like a huge bird from a zoo,” says Enid.
The other stormtrooper appears in the kitchen now. Vivvy giggles, watching the dog. Holding on to the kitchen sink behind her, she teeters in four-inch, bright-yellow high heels I doubt Francie ever wore even once. Vivvy rubs her eyes without removing her mask.
“You like the costumes, I see. I’m glad. And the shoes,” I say, “are an interesting accessory choice. I like it—it’s inspired.”
“Wait till you see what Vivvy’s done to hers.”