by Nisi Shawl
When I lay down my head, the noise stopped. The world stopped. It just stopped.
It started again with a great shake, then smaller ones, rattling the trailer like an empty can. I held on. Earthquake. No, an accident on the freeway, just above, a semi breaking through steel guardrails. A tsunami. An explosion. A bomb, a solar flare. The switching of the magnetic poles. The apocalypse.
The trailer stopped shaking for a moment. Outside, the sky was darker than I’d ever seen. Then, shaking again, but this time, the air moved, thrumming and pulsing. I sucked in a breath and held it.
The air entered me like a demon. It was cold on my teeth, and as it traveled through me, my flesh jiggled separately from my bones. All my hairs—head, neck, and arms—stood up. It smelled like magnetized iron. Thin, strong beams of lights poked through the open windows, searching like fingers.
I pushed out the breath I was holding. It came out loud and angry, a sound I’d never heard. One blade of light found me, touched me, pulled me to my feet. I stood naked, as the light traced over me. It was alive, I was sure, and its touch was one of a blind family friend marveling at how I’d grown.
I slapped it away.
The light hit the wall, and the trailer rocked like a dinghy in a storm. Outside, the truck’s horn honked and the motor revved. I held on as best I could, but was tossed to my knees. I pulled myself towards the door as the trailer pitched to and fro.
It felt like a vertical climb from my bed to the trailer door. But when I tumbled outside onto the ground, everything was oriented in the right direction: the ground was down, the trees grew up, and across the sky was the bottom of a spaceship.
The light blades searched for me again. I rolled into a ball and covered my head with my arms. The truck honked faster, revved harder, headlights flashing. Inside the trailer, Roxy’s laptop switched on and off, blaring pieces of “Free Bird” through the speakers: “leave here tomorrow—remember me—be travelling on—got to see.” The light found me, of course, stroked me gently in apology for frightening me. It ran through my hair and patted my shoulders, and, with magnetic fingers, tried to lift me up.
I didn’t want to go. I stretched my full length and dug into the dirt and grass. I held onto my world. The light tried to pry me free, first softly, then in frustration.
We struggled, my mother and I. She was the light. The more it touched me, the more I felt her. The light scolded and begged, and I held on. The light pushed, rolled across the ground like water, unleashing thunder that set off a rain shower of the windows’ blunt safety glass.
“This is my home,” I said or thought—it wasn’t clear which—and the light gave a mother’s sigh.
Then it was all over. They were gone for now, but they would be back. The truck’s motor and headlights cut and the ship was gone. The trailer clattered as everything again surrendered back to gravity.
Everything was still. No traffic or cicadas, no honking or “Free Bird,” a complete absence of sound except for my heart. The inside of my head felt bigger than the outside. I didn’t move, didn’t breathe. Rocks and glass and plastic stems pushed sharply into my knees and hands, but I didn’t move until the air settled back, the lights switched on, and even then I waited for the first brave cicada to tentatively chirp, for another to answer, for traffic noise and the lake waves hitting the shore. Only then did I exhale and sit down. Right by my foot was the stuffed unicorn, as if it’d followed me out of the trailer. It was dirty and a little damp, but I hugged it close as noises began trickling back.
I didn’t know how long I sat there. Without the moon as a reference, it could have been minutes or hours. I sat and watched the path, willing Roxy to emerge from the darkness. I sat until the air condensed, beading on my skin. My teeth chattered and I silenced them in the unicorn. Somewhere, inside one of the trailers, the phone rang three times in quick succession.
Ω
The footsteps were loud, glass and twigs crunching beneath them. Too heavy to be Roxy, but unmistakably human. Then, a silhouette, rectangular and male. Any other night and I probably would have been alarmed. But I was incapable of doing anything more than wiping my face on my unicorn, holding it as best as I could in front of my chest and calling out, “Hello?”
The silhouette stepped closer. The man was in his thirties, with a square haircut but young eyes, which struggled to adjust in the low light. I saw him first, but it took me the few seconds he needed to make me out to recognize him: Scott Lynn Miller, a loss prevention guard from the mall where I worked. It didn’t make any sense why he was here. Before I could open my mouth, he’d come closer, asking if I was hurt.
“No,” I answered. Yes. “What are you doing here, Scott Lynn Miller?”
Then he realized I was naked. “Ahhh,” he started. He seemed like he wanted to look, but he studied the ground. He held out his hand, his eyes still pointed the other way. “I came for you.”
Unthinking, I took his hand, but jerked away in surprise and pain. My hands were deeply cut and sticky. Scott Lynn Miller then grabbed my wrists and pulled me up. I swayed on my legs. I noticed his knuckles had a few strong black hairs on them.
“You’re all wet,” Scott Lynn Miller said. He kept his hand on my arm to steady me. He looked past me at the yard. “And everything’s a mess.” Then he made a surprised face at the ground. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Is this how it always looks?”
I saw the garden, littered with broken glass and scattered belongings, my and Roxy’s trailer nearly upended. “No,” I said, a little annoyed and ashamed. “There was a—” I thought for a second. “—an earthquake.”
It’d felt like an earthquake.
Scott Lynn Miller furrowed his brow until it almost reached his chin. “An earthquake?” He shook his head. “I didn’t feel a thing.” He looked around again, still not looking at me. “But it sure looks like an earthquake. Or Katrina.” He looked back at me. “You know I was in Katrina, right?”
I did. It was one of the few things I did know about him. But I didn’t really care. I was naked, I was cold and exhausted, and it didn’t make any sense that he was there. “What are you doing here, Scott Lynn Miller?” I asked a second time.
“You need to lie down,” he said.
“That’s my trailer,” I answered, making a sloppy gesture to the upturned one, big enough to see in his peripheral vision.
“Whose are those?” he asked, jerking his chin at the others.
“My parents’. My aunt and uncle’s, and my grandmother’s.”
“Are you alone?”
I started to nod, momentarily terrified. I didn’t know why he was here. But then I remembered something else I knew about Scott Lynn Miller: he’d injured himself doing construction, and he was on a waiting list for the police academy. Which, I knew, did not in and of itself guarantee my safety in his presence, but there was also a freaking spaceship hovering above us somewhere containing my other, seemingly magnetic and destructive parents. “My sister’s out with her girlfriend.”
“Can you walk?” he asked, leading me a step towards my parent’s trailer. I could, unsteady as a fawn. He led me, looking straight ahead at the door. He dropped my hand to push the door and looked away as I climbed the stairs, went inside, and fell onto Mamo and Tate’s bed.
Inside, it looked like nothing had happened. A few things had rattled off their hooks or shelves, probably when our trailer tipped, and Scott Lynn Miller hung a frying pan back onto a hook and picked a book up from the floor. “An earthquake?” he asked again.
“An earthqu—” I answered, interrupting myself with a yawn. Scott Lynn Miller unfolded the comforter from the edge of the bed and covered me. This time, I was sure he looked, but my eyes were closing.
I dozed intermittently, feverishly, without dreaming. I listened for Roxy over the strange Scott Lynn Miller sounds: boiling water for tea, flipping through one of Mamo’s self-help books, surfing through basic cable channels. I stirred when Roxy did return, but couldn’t tell the tim
e—the sky was navy blue outside the roof panels.
Roxy yelled, “What the fuck?” and “Who are you?” and “Where’s my phen?” and then Scott Lynn Miller’s deep voice answered something I couldn’t make out. I thought I heard Natalie, too, as the voices softened to murmuring and blended into the surrounding noise, and I finally fell into a deep, empty sleep.
Ω
Hot morning sun streamed through the open roof panel, and I sweated awake. Scabs had set my hands into tender half-fists during the night. They cracked and leaked clear fluid when I flattened them.
I stepped over Scott Lynn Miller, asleep on the kitchen floor, using one of Tate’s slippers to prop his head. There was glass everywhere on the path, and I tested each step before putting down my weight. The ofisa door was ajar; inside, Natalie and Roxy curled together across the sofa bed.
They both snored up the smell of stale beer. I poked Roxy gently to wake her, and she rolled over, threw her arm over her eyes and made an unhappy sound. Then she sat bolt upright. “Rovli,” she said. “What a fucking mess.”
“I know,” I answered. I pointed to Natalie and Roxy shook her head, giving me secret sister signals that we would talk outside, in private.
“What happened to your hands?” she asked, when we got outside.
“It’s hard to explain,” I said.
“You’d better try.”
“I know,” I said.
We made our way through the garden. Roxy bent over and grabbed her foot. Off balance, she nearly fell over into the dirt. “Glass!” she yelled. “I got glass in my foot.” She stepped down on her heel and hobbled to the hot tub. I followed her, and we pulled ourselves up onto the edge. I tried to pull the glass sliver from the ball of her foot, but my chewed-up hands wouldn’t work right. She squeezed it out like a pimple and threw it over her shoulder.
I didn’t say anything, but at that moment, she knew. She just needed something to remind her that she already knew. After all, we’d all been waiting for it.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, shit. Shit, shit, shit.” Then she started to cry.
“It’s OK,” I said to her, not entirely sure it was. The words sounded hollow, but necessary.
“No,” Roxy sniffed. “It isn’t.” She wiped her face and gave a strange smile. “You know what, Rovli? I am selfish. I don’t want you to go.” She grabbed my arm. “Partly because I don’t want to lose you, but partly because I want to go. Natalie asked me to come home with her and I told her yes.” She leaned in and placed her cheek on my shoulder. “I don’t want you to go. I want to go. I want to be the one to go.”
I placed my arm around her. “It’s OK.”
“No,” she answered. “It isn’t. I’m a terrible person. A terrible, selfish person.”
“You aren’t.”
“Maybe.” She pushed her face into the curve of my neck. “I don’t really want to go,” she whispered. “I just don’t think I can stay.”
We hugged one another and the crying started again. We cried for each other and for ourselves. And in that crying, neither of us heard Scott Lynn Miller walk up and watch us. I don’t know how long he stood there, because I had my forehead against Roxy’s short, soft hair. He waited patiently, apparently, until both of us seemed cried out before finally interrupting. “I’ll stay and help clean up,” he said, as if that was what we were discussing. “Don’t worry.”
We sat up and looked at Scott Lynn Miller. Roxy rubbed the back of her hand against her face like an eraser and waited for me to answer. When I didn’t, she said to him, “You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to,” he answered. “I have some experience in this. Kizzy probably told you.”
Roxy shot me a secret sister look, a what-the-fuck-is-he-talking-about look, but she was gracious and a quick liar. “Of course she did. We’d appreciate the help.”
“I’d like to talk to Kizzy, if I could,” he said.
Roxy bristled a little, weighing whether to leave me or not. I prayed she wouldn’t. But she didn’t want to be there with him. “I’ll make some coffee.”
Scott Lynn Miller held out his hand to Roxy, to help her over a pile of glass by her feet. “That would be lovely.”
Roxy gave me a quick sister’s glance meaning that she’d be right back, and limped as gracefully as she could toward Mamo and Tate’s trela.
Scott Lynn Miller hefted himself up on the side of the tub next to me. “I will help clean up,” he said. “So don’t be upset.” He looked at me, at his feet, at me, then slid an arm around me.
“Scott Lynn Miller—” I started.
He dropped his arm. “I’d love for you to call me Scott.”
“Scott Lynn Miller,” I repeated. “What are you doing here?” Asking him for the third time.
He turned to face me. “Let me explain.”
Even with some distance between us, he was altogether too close. I felt like I didn’t have a choice. “OK, then.”
He looked back at his shoes like what he wanted to say was written on them. “I have basically nothing to offer,” he said. “After Katrina, well, even before Katrina, I didn’t have anything. I mean, well, I do have something.” He glanced up from his shoes. “I have a child, Dan.” He paused to let that sink in, then continued. “Anyway, my ex moved Dan up here and after the storm, I followed.”
“OK,” I said. I wasn’t sure what anything he said had to do with me.
“Anyway.” He paused again, and shifted position. “Dan. I got Dan a goldfish like a month ago, and the goldfish just died, because, you know, goldfish just die. You’ve had a goldfish. You know what I mean.”
I shook my head. “I never had a goldfish.”
He smiled like I was joking. “Anyway,” he continued. “So, Dan and I gave the fish a funeral. Dan was a little old for that, and did the whole eye rolling thing, but I could tell it was important. We stood over the toilet and I asked if Dan wanted to say a few words. And you know what the kid said?”
“What?” I looked at his hand, which was gripping the lip of the tub, awfully near my leg.
“Dan said the fish, Joe, Dan named him Joe, had a full fish life and was happy when he died, having done and accomplished every fishy thing he wanted to. My child said this.” Scott Lynn Miller seemed impressed.
I shifted my position, which he took as a signal to continue.
“There’s something about you,” he said. “I didn’t have the guts to ask you out beforehand and my kid, well, gave me the courage. I haven’t done shit with my life yet, Kizzy. But I want to die happy.” He looked back again at his shoes. “So I broke into Macy’s personnel files to find your address.”
I slipped off the edge of the tub hard onto my feet.
“It’s probably a little creepy,” he said. “But also, I hope, romantic.” He looked around. “I tried to call you a bunch of times, but I never got ahold of you.”
I broke into tears again. Scott Lynn Miller spread a goofy, clueless smile on his face as he put his arm around me again. I wanted to shake it off, push him away, into the glass. I wanted to scream and scare him away, but I couldn’t find the strength or courage. I wished him away as hard as I could, but the harder I wished, the harder he embraced me. I didn’t return the embrace, but it didn’t matter. He breathed in and out in my hair and held me close, only releasing me when Roxy emerged from the trailer with a tray of Turkish coffees. Scott Lynn Miller finally let me go and took a cup. I could still feel the ghost of his mouth, hot and damp, on my head. He slurped down some coffee and smiled again at Roxy.
She shook her head at him and tried to read my face as I took a mug for myself. I don’t know what she saw, but she turned and headed towards the ofisa with the remaining two cups on the tray.
“Anyway,” he said. “It’s not much of a story, but there it is. What do you think?”
When I didn’t answer right away but instead buried my face into the steaming cup to take a long drink, he took it as tacit agreement, and put his arm back aroun
d me. “So why do you only have the front of a house anyway?” he asked, at the same moment music blasted from the ofisa across the yard. It was “Free Bird” again. “If I stayed here with you, girl…” he sang, and squeezed his arm around me tighter. “…things won’t ever be the same.” He looked at me. “I love this song.”
Ω
Roxy, Natalie, and Scott Lynn Miller took turns in the gardening gloves, picking up the shards piece by piece and depositing them into buckets. My hands rendered me nearly useless. But I walked around and picked up the biggest pieces, pain be damned, grateful to be doing something instead of sitting with Scott Lynn Miller’s arm around my shoulder.
Natalie and Roxy took over the glass-gathering process while Scott Lynn Miller and I righted the trailer, which landed back on the A-chassis with a great crash, smashing out the last intact window. We filled the six buckets we had and took a break, sitting together on the edge of the hot tub like a line of crows. We were debating where to dump the buckets when the familia came home. Early. No one heard them until they were already there.
Gracie stood with her hands on her hips and a grimace that looked like we’d lost her a bet. Uncle Marko held up Dei by one arm, while Tate and Mamo stood behind them all, taking it in. The mess, the girls, the white boy, and me.
It was only a few seconds, enough for them to see Roxy grasping Natalie’s hand and me leaning away from Scott Lynn Miller.
There is no word in Romani for whatever I was, but the one for Roxy Tate spit like poison. “Pampuritsa.” The mess, the gadjo next to me, it didn’t matter. Tate saw the girls’ hands. “Pampuritsa,” he repeated.
I lost my breath at the sound, but Roxy puffed up. She aimed back at him, but Mamo stepped into the line.
“Your Káko Fatlip called off the wedding,” she said. “We tried to call and when no one answered, I worried.”
I had my breath again. “It was my fault. Let me explain…” I paused, not really sure what I was going to say. But no one was looking at me anyway.