St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

by Karen Russell

  Laramie tells Big Red that she is lucky. Mr. Pappadakis doesn’t know when she’s home in the first place, so she never has to sneak around. Laramie sneaks out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon. Laramie bragged to Big Red that she had personally defiled eight out of thirteen Giant Conchs.

  “See that big ’un over there?” she whispered.

  They’re all big, Laramie.

  “That’s where I sucked off the chlorine vendor.” Her voice got low and slurry. “See that curly black hair stuck to your shoe? That’s his son Lyle’s—”

  Laramie shut up abruptly. A second later, her father came striding down the boardwalk. At five feet three inches, with wrinkly skin and a bright, bald face, Mr. Uribe looked like an animate peanut. Too short, too fat, Big Red thought. He couldn’t even be the understudy for a TV dad. But at least he didn’t look like cadaverous Pappadakis.

  “All right, kids,” he said, clapping his hands. “Tour’s over. Don’t forget to buy your plush conchs and conch accessories in the gift store. The ferry is waiting for you.” Most of the kids went stampeding towards the dock. Big Red hung back. She stared over the railing, sucking salt from her braid. Her orange hair was knotted with sand. Below her, the sun was drowsing on the surface of the water.

  “Look!” Big Red breathed. She pointed at the marina. Manatees were pushing their bovine wings through the water, emerging in ones and twos from under the pier. They swirled through motor oil in slow, graceful circles. “How beautiful…”

  “They look like giant turds!” Rogelio squealed. “Giant turds, giant turds!” The other children sniggered.

  Infidels! Big Red thought. She had just learned this word in social studies, and liked to walk around thinking it with religious furor. Sometimes, she fantasized about a great pyre, where she burned all of her heathen classmates. Manatees are God’s creatures, not turds! she would roar. And my…name…is LILLITH!

  “Get it, Big Red?” Rogelio elbowed her.

  “Ha-ha,” Big Red laughed. “Turds.”

  She followed the others into the store. Much more excitement was generated by the Giant Conch sea-salt shakers than by the shells themselves. Big Red didn’t even have to wait until the coast was clear; nobody was looking. She slunk back down the dock to where the toppled shell was hunched on its side. She took a darting look around, then slipped under the yellow CAUTION ropes. Big Red crouched on her hands and knees and inched forward along the crimson outer wing that spun into the shell. Cornuta’s inner chamber seemed to pulse with light, purpling inward to some effulgent, unreachable end point. Down below, the scooped-out hollow looked irresistibly snug.

  Sucking in her stomach, knowing better, Big Red pushed her way inside. She slid down the canal and oomphed onto the floor. It was a much bigger drop-off than she had expected. Inside, the shell had a clean, blue smell, like the memory of salt. It took a while for her eyes to adjust to the twinkly dark. The shell body bowled out to the size of a walk-in closet. Big Red wished that it was even smaller, the width of a cabinet, a cupboard. She pressed both hands to the parabolic sides of the shell. She closed her eyes and smiled—it felt like being parenthesized. When Big Red looked down at her palms, she saw that they were covered with beach grit: sand and cigarette butts, wet gull feathers. Someone had covered the white, harp-shaped ledges with graffiti. Nasty words, bad words. It was a language that Big Red recognized without understanding. She mouthed the words to herself:——————. They made her feel too many things all at once, hot-faced and dizzy and scared and ashamed. She didn’t draw a total blank; instead, the words smudged Big Red’s mind with fleshy blurs. Something opaque and darkly familiar, like two bodies moving behind steamed-up shower glass. On the far wall, she noticed more scrawled graffiti: LARAMIE ♥ RAFFY 4EVA!

  Big Red stared up at the opalescent canopy above her. The spines radiated outwards, pink to puce to a speckled orange. She could see tiny perforations in the walls. Good. Big Red pressed her cheek to the cool floor of the shell with a martyred glee. I hope the Giant Conch has one million gajillion cracks and fills up with rainwater and I drown. Then they’ll be sorry. It gave her a smug satisfaction to picture beating Mr. Pappadakis, the come-from-behind victor in a race to the grave.

  Ever since they moved into Mr. Pappadakis’s cavernous house, Big Red has sought out tiny spaces. She climbs into the clothes hamper and pulls the lid on behind her. She sits for hours under the sink, eyes closed, listening to the gurgling of the pipes. Some nights she crawls into the neighbor’s dog house and holds Mr. Beagle’s tight, squirmy body until she can feel all of its bones. And sometimes, if she sits long enough, it happens. Beneath the hum of her own blood, beneath the hum of the world itself, she thinks she can hear the faint strains of another song. It’s a red spark of sound, just enough to cast acoustic shadows of the older song that she has forgotten. It sounds like this:

  When Big Red opens her eyes, long-jawed shadows have overtaken the shell. Outside, the tide is coming in. The foamy rush of unseen water laps at her ears. Big Red shimmies to the back of the conch and holds her eye up to the fist-sized opening like a telescope. The visible sky is purple and clobbered with stars. Lightning licks the palm fronds. The whole conch hums with the promise of rain.

  At first, Big Red is just pretending to be trapped. It isn’t until she tries to get out of the Giant Conch that she realizes she really is stuck. She can belly-crawl back down the spine of the shell, no problemo. But when she tries to pull herself onto the calcite ledge that angles up and out of the siphon, she keeps sliding back down. The opening of the Giant Conch seems to have narrowed, somehow, and Big Red can’t find purchase on the slippery shell walls. She tries to backtrack, but she can’t wedge her pudgy body through the crack in the tip of the shell. Oh God, she thinks, how embarrassing. Please just leave me here to die.

  But as the minutes tick by, she starts to feel increasingly uneasy. The fear of being found, of the sisters’ wimpled censure and Rogelio’s fat jokes, melts into a new fear: What if nobody is looking for her at all?

  Don’t panic, the grown-up voices in Big Red’s head say sternly. They sound a little bit like Coach Crotty, the phys ed teacher, and a lot like Margarita, the TV mother on Guess Who Loves You More? Stay calm.

  But the next thunderclap undoes her. Suddenly, the prospect of spending the night here seems too terrible to bear. Big Red’s body heaves with panic. She bloodies her hands on Cornuta’s horny clefts; she writhes on an invisible hook; she goes salmon-leaping towards the top of the shell, again, and again. And again and again she slumps back, battered and exhausted.

  “Help!” Big Red squeals in the empty shell. Hot, oily tears roll down her face. “I’m stuck, I’m stuck, help!”

  Nobody is coming, the grown-up voices intone, a tribunal of icicles. Correction: the rain is coming. So you’d better help yourself get out of this mess before it storms.

  But then there he is, looking inside the shell with a worried expression. Big Red stops blubbering. Those piercing blue eyes, that gosling-soft hair. The doomed, affable face of the World’s Greatest Sensational Mystery.

  “What are you doing in there, kid?” Barnaby barks. “Park’s closed.”

  The first raindrop hits the tiny hairs on the back of his neck. The sky is a seething, cobalt blue; it’s going to start coming down any minute. What a nightmare. Barnaby knows that a better man would be feeling sorry for the kid, a roly-poly redhead who is staring up at him. Instead, Barnaby is thinking: I’m going to miss the big game, and possibly the last ferry. The boss is going to find some way to pin this fat kid’s misfortune on me. And I’m not even getting paid overtime.

  “Didn’t you see the sign? Cornuta’s out for the count.”

  “I just wanted to look around,” she squeaks, “but now I can’t get back out.”

  “Well, you got in, didn’t you?” Another raindrop slides down his nose. “Why don’t you give it another try?”

  Big Red holds up her bloody palms and shakes her head.
And Barnaby finds himself in an awkward sort of hostage situation, negotiating with the prisoner for her own release.

  “Listen. Do you hear that?” he says through gritted teeth. “It is going to start raining any minute, kid. And we will have many sodden problems if we miss that ferry. So I need you to give it one more try.”

  She puts a hesitant hand on the jagged underlip of the ledge out. She tries to do a pull-up and winces.

  “Careful! Can you move your leg? Can you wiggle your toes? You may have sprained something.”

  Big Red wiggles all five of her toes inside of her sneaker. She looks up at her Houdini and says nothing.

  “Well? If you can’t move them,” Barnaby sighs, “I’ll have to come in and get you myself.”

  Big Red withdraws her hand. “I can’t.”

  He groans. “This oughta be good.” Barnaby has never worked hard enough to develop the tawny musculature of a career broom pusher. His muscles have long since gone soft and turned to fat.

  “Okay, kid, you’ve got to help, too….”

  Barnaby finds himself thinking many ungenerous thoughts.

  “I can’t get you out of there if you don’t cooperate, you know….”

  Thoughts such as: I probably can’t get you out of there at all, you goddamn butterball. He is thinking: winches, pulleys. Goggled men blowtorching the chubby lass out, the boss somehow blaming Barnaby for the lost revenue.

  “Jesus, kid, would you just—”

  “You’re hurting me!”

  “Put your right foot there, and push with your…goddamn it!”

  Barnaby looks at his watch. Seven minutes till the ferry leaves.

  “Okay. Clearly, this isn’t working. Just hang tight. I am going to go tell the ferry driver to wait for us. And then I’ll call for help….”

  Thunder booms through the City and they both jump. Barnaby watches the poor kid bang her head on the chitinous dome of the shell. Her gray eyes are filling with tears.

  “I…I’m sorry, sir,” she gasps. “I can’t. Please, please don’t leave me here.”

  Barnaby stops in his tracks. Oh, he wishes the kid hadn’t called him sir.

  “All right,” he hears himself saying. “Let’s give it one more shot in the dark.”

  They seesaw together in a sweaty dance: Barnaby pulls, and Big Red pushes. Big Red pushes, and Barnaby pulls. And in the middle of their pendular wrangling—while Barnaby is pulling, the blue tendons throbbing on his spindly arms, and Big Red is pushing, pigeon-toed on the polished floor—she falls backwards for a second time. And pulls Barnaby in after her. Cornuta reverberates with their strangled cries, and the splintery crunch of bone.

  “Are you still angry with me?”

  It’s been almost an hour since they heard the last ferry engine gunning in the distance. Night seeps into the City, an implacable blackness. Barnaby’s face is inches from her own. Big Red is acutely aware of every pore on her face, every follicle of hair on her head. Her smile feels huge and strange.

  Barnaby doesn’t answer. He is rubbing his leg and staring morosely out the small portal where Cornuta’s spiral opens to the sky. A few fat raindrops plink into the sand. Goosebumps prick up along his arms. He shivers, snaps up his top two shirt buttons. The floor, the walls of the shell have become freezing to the touch.

  “How long till your boss comes?”

  “I told you, kid. At least twelve hours.” He is holding his curly brown head in his hands. “Jesus. Any guesses as to when your parents are going to sound the alert?”

  Big Red tugs at her shoelace. “Hard to say.”

  Big Red’s mother is away on business. She is “on call,” and often has to leave at a moment’s notice. This is confusing to Big Red, because her mother is also unemployed.

  “You’ll understand when you’re older,” her mother sighs. Then she gives her the scary, slack tightrope smile, and Big Red knows not to press.

  Mr. Pappadakis is estranged from lucidity. On his bad days, he thinks Big Red is a figment of his imagination. On his good days, he lives around her, in the polite, damning way that he will eat around certain loathsome foods on his plate.

  “What about your dad, then?” Barnaby asks. “I mean, your real dad?”

  Big Red has never met her biological father. She heard her mother refer to him once, with a dismissive wave of her hand, as “a rainy afternoon at the Bowl-a-Bed.” She’s never even seen a picture. But Big Red hates him just the same. She is learning about genetics, and she envisions her father as a big, bow-legged X. Pumping out the evil chemical that accounts for Big Red’s glandular woes, the orange injustice of her stupid hair.

  “Kid? What’s your name anyways?”

  “Big…” She bites her lip. “Lillith.”

  “Big Lillith?” He smiles. “You look like a Lillith.”

  “Really?” Her face mushrooms out of the darkness with a terrible hopefulness. “I do?”

  Lillith is the name of her old self, the one she left behind when they moved to the island. On the Mainland, her nickname used to be Lil. That was before her body swelled into something loafy and unrecognizable. Now the kids at her new school have rechristened her: BIG RED—BIG RED!

  They chaw imaginary wads of gum like truckers when they say it. They chaw it so often that even she has started to think of herself this way, “Big Red,” in the cheery singsong of her tormenters.

  Sometimes Big Red can hear the ghost of Lillith haunting this new body. At night, Lillith goes wailing down the corridors of Big Red’s limbs. She swings angrily in the belfry of her hips, the nave of her breasts. “Growing pains.” Her mother shrugs. Hearing her real name spoken aloud, Big Red sheds her awkwardness like a mantle.

  “You know,” she grins, “who you look like?”

  Barnaby looks at her blearily and shakes his head.

  “Harry Houdini.”

  “Houdini, huh?” He grins in spite of himself. “That’s a first. I guess you could call me a magician. My name’s Barnaby. I’m the janitor. I make the trash disappear.” His laugh echoes hollowly in the dark conch. “It’s a limited bag of tricks, kid. I’m no great escape artist, clearly. I couldn’t crack us out of this shell.”

  “Houdini is my favorite,” she says shyly.

  He snorts. “Shouldn’t you have a crush on one of those boy bands? Gregorian Chowder, or whatever their name is?”

  Big Red makes a face. “Everybody will come to their senses and stop liking them in three months, tops. Houdini is perennial.”

  For a ten-year-old girl, Big Red has a rich fantasy life. Pirates tie her to their tattooed shoulders and stroke her parrot feathers. Impish, asexual jockeys named Nate or Stan nudge their heels into her flanks with a stirrupy gentleness. Zookeepers put her in cages filled with clean, soft straw. They ask simple things of her—Honk this rubber ball with your nose! Eat a banana!—and applaud softly when she succeeds. “Even better than the ocelot!”

  But her favorite is the Houdini fantasy. Big Red disagrees with his biographers, who say that he was driven by his longing to shuck off this mortal coil. She knows that he was all the time just searching for a box that could hold him. In the Houdini fantasy, she is curled inside an iron nautilus that sinks slowly to the dark sea floor, sending up silvery columns of bubbles. She has shackled dreams in blue meadows of sea grass, an inert argonaut. The nautilus is nothing like this porous, polluted shell. It is a seamless wedge of stone, impregnable. The keyhole subsumed back into the metal, and no suggestion of a lock.

  “Do you think that’s normal?” Big Red asks Barnaby. “To daydream about that stuff?”

  “Sure.” Barnaby shrugs. When he was her age, he fantasized about robots and cartoon mermaids.

  Outside the shell, Barnaby can just make out a single star, hung low in the violet sky. Now that he has lost all feeling in his left leg, things are much more pleasant. The pink island moon bounces off the whorled roofs of the City. Intermittent moonlight makes the spiraled domes appear to be moving, somehow, spinn
ing to the beat of an off-kilter carousel. The whole skyline ripples in jolly waves, as if the invisible world is casting material shadows.

  Raffy was wrong, though, Barnaby thinks; there are no ghosts in the City of Shells. It’s been dark for hours, and the only thing that’s materialized so far is a cloud of mosquitoes. The storm has held off for longer than Barnaby dared to hope. Even so, he can’t take much more of this. His leg is bent under him at a wrong-feeling angle, and it’s colder than a meat locker inside Cornuta. He wonders if his injury qualifies him for workman’s comp. Surely we’ll hear the ferry motoring up at any moment, Barnaby thinks. Surely somebody is out looking for us.

  Big Red, however, seems downright jubilant. She is squidged up under his right elbow, staring up at him with a moony grin. He smiles back at her uneasily.

  “Are you hungry?” Barnaby fishes around in his pocket. “Here.” He produces five lint-furred peppermints and a silver flask. “It’ll take the edge off.”

  Big Red takes a sip and blanches.

  “Well, hand it over if you’re not going to finish it.”

  She stares up at him and takes a long swig.

  Barnaby takes the bottle back and downs a few gulps himself. He hasn’t spent any real amount of time inside the shells. It’s depressing. He can see all the spots he’s missed. The hose reaches only so far, after all, and Barnaby isn’t known for his janitorial scruples. The dark stains are like Rorschach tests, each one diagnosing his professional shortcomings. Even by Cornuta’s muted glow, Barnaby can see the tarry footprints where his boots slipped, a monument to his most recent failure.