The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters

by Timothy Schaffert

  12.

  LILY AND JORDAN TOOK THE MONTE Carlo to Las Vegas after all, the old car making the ten-hour trip without incident. At a rest-stop tourist booth along the way, they’d picked up a brochure about Vegas weddings; as Jordan drove into town, Lily navigated from a map on the back of the brochure, directing them to the Marriage License Bureau—it was late, but the office stayed open until midnight. Both cranky from the long drive, Lily and Jordan stood in the crowded lobby of the bureau and filled out the papers with the golf pencils they’d been given. They were married just down the street, ten minutes later, in a five-minute ceremony.

  In their motel that night, both exhausted, Lily lay in bed with the pillow balled up at the back of her neck to keep her wedding-day ringlets fresh. After the ceremony, she’d had her hair done in a salon in the El Cortez. Her wild ringlets were still gathered up and speared with stems of baby’s breath. Unable to sleep, she flipped open and closed the lid to the antique ring Jordan had placed on her finger.

  She sat up and turned on the light to watch Jordan asleep beside her. He lay entirely still, and Lily could touch the pulse point of his wrist, his bottom lip, his eyelash, without waking him. The skin of his arms and his cheeks had creases from the wrinkled sheets and pillowcase. When Jordan had first started spending nights with Lily, he’d been restless, sitting up late reading romance novels Lily’s mother had left behind. If he’d fallen asleep, anything would wake him—the click on of the refrigerator or a cricket on the windowsill. But after a few months of living among Lily and Mabel, he seemed to catch their habit for deep sleeping.

  Lily had been studying how to read the bumps of people’s heads, and she ran her fingers over Jordan’s as he slept. She closed her eyes and saw herself as an old woman in an old dress, sitting deep in Jordan’s future in a shaded chair. She had a brief vision of Jordan patiently unknotting a knot in the lace of her boot.

  Lily wouldn’t leave him after all, she decided. She was tempted to wake him up to tell him that—to tell him that she’d thought of leaving him, and that she’d changed her mind watching him sleep so soundly. It might worry him, might instill some proper fear, to know that his wife made important decisions in the middle of the night without him. The nights might not pass so peacefully for him then.

  Lily lay back and closed her eyes and, to relax, promised herself that she didn’t have to go any farther south. She’d send her mother a picture postcard of the feathery showgirls of Vegas. “We got this close,” Lily would write, with nothing else but her name.

  I just don’t think it’s worth it, Lily thought, then she said it softly, out loud, hoping to hear a certainty in her own voice. But her mouth was dry and her voice cracked and she sounded like a child. Lily touched at her hair, at the sprig of baby’s breath breaking to pieces. She wanted to call Mabel, to wake her in the night. Lily wouldn’t have to say anything. Don’t tell me, Mabel would say, scolding but concerned. Let me guess. It was what Mabel always said when Lily called crying over some boyfriend from a phone booth on the street corner or from a friend’s house in the middle of the night. Don’t tell me, let me guess. Lily closed her eyes and tried to sleep thinking of Mabel’s voice, running the words over and over through her mind. Don’t tell me Don’t tell me Don’t tell me.

  Jordan spoke, startling Lily, and for a second she thought he might be talking in his sleep. His eyes closed, he said, “You’ve never been this far from home before, have you?”

  “Neither have you,” Lily said.

  “Yeah, I have.” He rolled over on his side and put his arm around Lily’s waist. “When Mom and Dad were trying to save their lousy marriage, when I was a kid, we took a family trip to stay in some bungalow on some beach in Virginia. There was a big storm and the windows broke. Dad cut the hell out of his hands cleaning up the glass. Things got better for a while, though, because me and Mom looked after him, bandaged him up, poured him his Jack and Coke. Kept those cheap stogies of his lit.”

  What the fuck do you know about anything? Lily thought, tears in her eyes. You’ve had a beautiful life.

  “I want a divorce,” she whispered, but he’d already fallen back to sleep or was pretending to sleep. If only he knew how to do something useful, like change the oil in a car. “I want a divorce,” she said again, crying but looking forward to returning home, when everything was over. She’d rent her own little place in town, hang up pictures torn from magazines, cook small meals on a tiny stove. She could go work with the secretaries at the grain office, the ladies addicted to Diet Coke and books on self-improvement. Lily fell asleep imagining slow hours of painting her nails dull colors, watching the clock, plotting a better life.

  WHEN SHE WOKE again a few hours later, Lily picked up her suitcase still packed and left Jordan in bed. It was still the middle of the night. I’m not abandoning him, she told herself. She just didn’t want her mother to see him yet, to see him scarred and scrawny, before Lily had had a chance to make any kind of impression. She hung the DO NOT DISTURB/NO MOLESTE sign on the doorknob, then walked across the quiet lot to the Monte Carlo. At least the car was running better now, she thought.

  Driving alone through the dark, along a highway that wound around mountains and hills, frightened Lily, but the terrible route distracted her from thoughts of her mother. When sunlight began to glow over the tops of the hills, when all she had left of the drive was the security of interstate, and when the radio began with its live, cheerful early-morning chatter, only then did Lily feel her stomach turning with nerves.

  South of Tucson, the miles were marked off in kilometers, giving her only a vague sense of how long she’d been driving. Lily imagined her mother on this same stretch of highway leaving behind her children and her husband in his grave for the land of bandits and earthquakes and miles of bad road.

  As she neared the border, she saw SAINT ADELAIDE’S WINERY—NEXT EXIT on a small billboard. She reached into her bag for the wine label her mother had sent weeks before; PRODUCED AND BOTTLED BY SAINT ADELAIDE’S WINERY it read in small print beneath a drawing of a mug shot of a terrifically mustached cowboy, a bullet hole in the upturned brim of his hat. Above him, it read OUTLAW ROS£. Lily held the label against her cheek, closed her eyes a second, and saw her mother and a man slow dancing knee-deep in crushed grape.

  In her stomach and in her head, Lily felt that dizzy, dip-in-the-road nausea, and she drove onto the exit ramp with hesitation. For so long she’d been picturing her mother in her southwestern life, just a washed-out rendering, all seen as if looking through a piece of green glass. But with just one slight turn in the road, all the familiar images were thrown into confusion.

  A dark purple variety of prickly pear was suddenly thick along the road. She passed a beat-up bus parked at the side of the interstate, where a group of women prisoners in bright yellow jumpsuits cut brush with scythes. A guard stood nearby, the butt of a rifle resting against his hip. Up ahead was the whitewashed facade of Saint Adelaide’s, a bell in its short tower, and Lily became afraid again. Not for herself, really, but for her mother. A simple tap on the shoulder on an ordinary day, and you’re faced with your little girl nowhere she should be.

  Lily pulled into the cul-de-sac of the winery and parked next to a dry, tiled fountain. Her ’do had collapsed from the wind of the drive, and she tried to repair it. She took from her purse a polyester scarf she’d bought from a souvenir shop (STOLEN FROM MUSTANG RANCH written across it), then put on some lipstick and clipped some sunshades onto her thick glasses. Lily licked her fingertips and adjusted a curl at her forehead. She looked a bit like a broke Vegas rat, and she liked it.

  Impossible questions rolled through her mind too quickly to jot down. Do you ever wake horrified in the middle of the night with worry for your children? Do you see us when you look in the mirror? Did you hate us for needing you?

  On the thick oak doors of the entryway was a CLOSED/CERRADO sign, above a listing of the hours. The tasting room would be open in a few minutes. Lily lit a cigaret
te and recalled a sexy border town in one of the first movies she ever saw. All the movies that played the Mazda were at least ten years old, some twenty, some thirty or forty, movies that were cheap for the theater to rent. Many of them were troubled-youth movies of the 1950s and ’60s—girls in tight pedal pushers snapping their gum and hating all the people who had got anything from life. The movie Lily remembered starred Jack Lord, her dad’s favorite actor. A woman rode in Jack Lord’s convertible, and her long stringy hair blew all around. This small, skinny woman had terrified Lily, the way she’d first come on the screen, stepping around the junk of a gas station, lurking around the corners. The sting and rattle of the music or her slinkiness or maybe even the way she chewed her gum suggested something terrible to Lily. But she never did find out if the woman did anything to Jack Lord. Lily’s dad rested his arm at the back of her seat, and she leaned her head back and fell asleep. When she woke up, she was slung over her dad’s shoulder, the theater lobby upside down. Lily was scared for a second, thought she was falling, then relaxed. She put her fingers in the back belt loops of her dad’s jeans and pressed her cheek against the soft cotton of his shirt.

  Lily brushed at her leg when she realized the coal of her cigarette had fallen and burned a hole in her dress. This is close enough, Lily thought, and she started the car and put it into reverse. She hit the gas and longed to drive in reverse all the way back to Nebraska. It would be satisfying to be the one to put the distance between herself and her mother, to watch the miles of road grow between them. But Lily slammed on the brakes when she heard a thump and caught sight of a motorcycle darting out of her way.

  “I’m sorry,” Lily said, opening the car door. “Did I hit you?” The woman on the motorcycle wore a leather jacket and thin chains, a bandanna tied at her forehead.

  “You couldn’t hit me if you tried,” the woman said. She smiled and turned off her bike. “I just pounded my fist against your trunk to startle you.”

  Lily was fascinated by the woman’s long dirty braid with twigs caught in it. Are you my mother’? she thought, in the words of an old storybook she’d read in the school library, a book about a bird, knocked from its nest, questioning all the creatures it came across. But Lily knew this wasn’t her mother. Her mother had blue eyes and no birthmark on her neck.

  “You been here before?” the woman said. “Me and some friends are camping out just down the road. The sisters bottle a great port. It’s like thirty bucks a pop but well worth it. The nuns do a swift business. They make money hand over fist, but not just at this. Margaret Bridget trades stock on the Internet.”

  The doors were opened then by an old woman in stiff, new, bright blue jeans and a T-shirt embroidered with roses. A woman in a khaki skirt and plaid blouse pulled a large terracotta pot around to prop open the door, then sprayed the cactus in the pot with a mister. Lily had hoped for, at least, familiar nuns, women in white habits maybe speckled with the splash of red wine. The nuns gestured hello, and the motorcycle woman said she needed to buy a corkscrew. “Though I’ve opened bottles in the desert without a corkscrew before,” she said, mostly to Lily. “You wrap the bottle tight in a towel and slam it against a rock . . . pushes the cork out good enough to get at.”

  Lily stepped into the tasting room and up to a row of oak barrels and wrought iron stools. It was too dark inside to see with the sunshades, so Lily took them from her glasses and paid two dollars for the tasting. The wines listed on the chalkboard had cutesy, desert-theme names, like “Roadrunner Riesling” and “Wild Coyote Chardonnay.” She could use a drink, awfully, even something as slight as cartoony tourist wine. But, “Anyone under twenty-one,” the nun said, singsong, “can only taste our non-alcoholics.”

  Lily didn’t argue or present her fake ID. She just nodded and tapped her knuckle on the barrel top. She couldn’t stomach the thought of even the most meaningless lie. It will be all gut-wrenching truth from here on out, she declared to herself. She’d demand confession and clarity, a nearly unhealthy honesty, from everyone in her life, even passing strangers. She wanted the truth right now from the nuns and the motorcycle woman, wanted to hear their every dirty thought and secret unspoken cruelty.

  As the motorcycle woman paid for her little bottle of port, Lily took her mother’s recent photograph from her purse. “Have you seen this woman?” she said, a line she’d heard in movies hundreds of times but had never before had the chance to say.

  “Of course,” the nun said, though the photo was a bit out of focus. “It’s Fiona.”

  Say it again, Lily wanted to say.

  “You’re her daughter,” the motorcycle woman said so suddenly, so sharply, it sounded like an accusation.

  “What?” Lily said, but all three women were staring at her, unsmiling, studying her face. They were looking for her mother, or the lack of her mother, in her features and her gestures. Lily felt blood running from her nose, flowing to her lip.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” the motorcycle woman said, pulling a handkerchief from her back pocket. Lily thought only her sister carried handkerchiefs. Mabel had collected many of them from within the antique shop and had laundered them and kept them in the top drawer of her vanity with pillows of cinnamon sachet. They made Mabel sneeze when she held them to her nose.

  Lily licked some of the blood from her lip and felt the blood thick in her throat. The motorcycle woman held the hanky to Lily’s face with one hand and held the back of her head with the other, as if administering chloroform.

  “Let me go get your mother,” one nun said. “She’s just in the back.”

  “No,” Lily said and asked for a restroom. In the restroom around a corner, at the sink, she took her glasses off and set them in an empty soap dish. She leaned her head back and pinched the bridge of her nose, the way the school nurse had once advised her after a fistfight with a pansy-ass girl hitter. The bleeding stopped after a minute or two, and Lily washed the blood from her face and took off the headscarf. She undid the pins of her hair and shook some of the curls out a bit, letting her hair fall to her shoulders. Her left nostril was now dark and swollen with clotted blood.

  “Your mother’s going to love seeing you,” the nun said when Lily stepped from the bathroom. All the women were smiling with lots of teeth, trying to look like they didn’t notice her warmed-over-deathness.

  The nun in the skirt put her arm through Lily’s and led her toward a door in the back of the tasting room. They walked outside to a small shed near the rows of circling vine. Lily felt queasy from the sun suddenly in her eyes, and she thought a public vomiting would be just the thing to follow a nosebleed. She bit her lip and pinched the skin of her arm to distract her from her stomachache.

  Inside the shed, she saw her mother’s shadow cast by the heavy sunlight in the room. Her mother was hidden by bamboo racks covered with bunches of grapes laid out to dry. Lily caught a glimpse of her gloved hand, a glint of light on a garden shear, the collar of her denim shirt. Something very pretty played on the radio, a song in Spanish. “Fiona,” the nun said, taking her arm from Lily’s and turning back toward the door to leave. Lily wanted the nun to stay, to introduce them, to talk with them, to rub Lily’s back, to stroke her hair, to hold her hand.

  Lily hadn’t been certain what to expect; her mother had sent photos over the years, but she was always blurry in them and poorly lit. She’d once sent a faulty Polaroid that hadn’t developed; it had arrived still a chemical swirl of blue and purple and green—she apparently hadn’t even waited for the picture to develop before dropping it into the envelope.

  Her mother stepped from around the corner of the racks, a not-old woman, but a woman far from the lost young thing Lily had been picturing for years. Like the motorcycle woman, she wore her dark hair pulled back in a long braid, loose strands framing her face. “Yes, dear?” she said, her head tilted.

  In that “Yes, dear?” Lily heard a pang of hope, a little expectation, something that suggested that her mother wanted this young woman standing before
her to be someone belonging to her.

  “I’m Lily,” Lily said. Then, “Lily Rollow.”

  Her mother’s smile dropped, her chin quivered, then her smile came back again. “Lily,” she said. “Oh, Lily,” she said. “Of course, you’re Lily. I’d know you anywhere. How could I not? You look just like him. You look exactly like your father.” She dissolved into tears then, there, across the room. She held one gloved hand to her face, the other at her hip, and she cried alone. Lily kept her distance, somehow comforted by the lack of her mother’s welcoming embrace or kiss on the cheek. Who else in the world would she greet like this? she thought, watching her mother come apart. Nobody else, she thought. Just me and my sister.

  “I’m sorry,” her mother said, wiping her tears with a towel she’d had tucked into the waist of her chinos. “You just look so much like your father.” Lily didn’t say anything about how she didn’t look anything at all like her father and that of course she’d recognize her because they’d been sending school pictures for years.

  “So where’s Madeline?” Fiona said. “Didn’t Madeline come?” It took Lily a second to remember that Madeline was Mabel’s real name.

  “She didn’t come. And she goes by Mabel now,” she said, feeling possessive of her sister’s choices.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. She rolled her eyes and put her hands on her hips in a motherly gesture stolen from a sitcom, like Oh, yes. Oh, how well I know that wacky Madeline. “The name I gave her wasn’t good enough.”

  When her mother looked at her again, she furrowed her brow and squinted. “Lily, your nose is bleeding,” she said, just as Lily felt the blood wet again at her lip.

  “Oh, fuck,” Lily said.

  “Don’t say that word,” her mother said, coming to her with the towel. Lily didn’t mind the gentle scolding. What else? she wanted to say. What other words don’t you want to hear”?