by Shruti Swamy
“I didn’t want to wake anybody up,” she said.
“Come down from there,” I said. She climbed down the steps very carefully, holding on to the railing. We began to walk. “Are you tired?”
“No,” she said. She held my hand out of habit. Her other arm swung free. She was growing quick; she might reach my waist, it felt, in a matter of weeks.
“What happened?” I said. “Were you scared of something? Did you have a fight?”
“I thought you were going to give my bed away.”
“That’s absurd, Didi, we would never give your bed away.”
“Well, that’s what I thought.” The two of us waited at the light, even though there was nobody coming. All the neighborhood cats had come out, the shy ones that skittered away if they saw us during the daytime, but at night they were free and hissed if we got too close. “Do you ever feel sad when you go to the library?”
“Do you?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I feel like there are just so many books there and I will never be able to read them all.”
“A lot of those books aren’t even good books. They’re like cookbooks and books on computer programming.”
“Oh. So you don’t feel sad in the library?”
“Sometimes I do.”
I had been walking quickly, and she lagged a little behind me, so I slowed. It was a great pleasure to watch her move. She gathered her hands into fists and marched, full of destination. “Why were you worried we were going to give your bed away?”
“Well, there are all these friends who sleep outside. Mom gets really sad to see all those friends outside. So I thought maybe since I wasn’t using my bed she would give it to one of them. I don’t mind just for the night, but tomorrow I would need my bed again and what would happen if he didn’t want to leave? Would we have to share it? Why do those friends have to sleep outside, anyway?”
It was a question she asked frequently, and never seemed satisfied with an answer. So I just shrugged. “I don’t know, Didi. Some friends sleep outside, some friends sleep inside. But we would never give your bed away.”
“I know you wouldn’t, but what if Mom wanted to?”
“Mom knows that your bed is your bed, even when you’re not using it, okay?”
“Okay,” she said. Sometimes I still couldn’t read her.
“Didi, there’s something I want to tell you. You had an older brother.”
“I did?” she said. “Where is he?”
“He died, before he was born.”
“What kind of person was he?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I looked down at her. I could see the thought of a brother moving around in her brain. Still I pushed her. “His brain wasn’t fully formed, so he died.”
“Died?” said Didi. Then she said, “Like all those people in Japan.”
“Kind of like that,” I said. We crossed Valencia Street, a strange press of people because the bars were all closing, and they seemed shocked to see Didi, standing so small and fearless among them. Drunk people have their own logic, I suppose. I lifted her up. It was that old myth, Krishna’s father carrying baby Krishna on his shoulders, the waters rising to touch the child’s feet. I held on to her shins, her feet knocking against my chest; she wrapped her arms around my neck and leaned forward so her chest was against my head. Then we crossed Valencia and the streets were empty.
“Dad, what happened to those people in Japan?”
“They died, Didi.”
“I know, I mean, what happened to them?”
“They drowned,” I said. “Or something fell on them. Or maybe some people had heart attacks.”
“But what happened?”
She was on the edge of it. I held on to her. My shoulders began to ache.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
The hill up to our house was steep. “Didi, can I put you down?” I said.
“Okay,” she said.
I knelt so she could get down. I thought of her brother. For a moment I could see him so clearly, standing beside her on the sidewalk. He had the face of that high-school wrestler I surrendered to, which is to say, my own face. His arms hung down at his sides. It was with a terrific anger and love he had wrestled me all those years ago. Didi trundled along beside me. Then we were home. I lifted her and took her to bed. I took off her shoes and her socks and put on her nightie that was still in her backpack with her toothbrush and her joke book and her copy of Wuthering Heights. I sat in the dark with her in her tiny room until she fell asleep, which was not very long. The night air had kept me awake; now here in the warm house I felt old and sleepy. I felt sleep begin to hold me, as I imagine death would, gently around the waist. For a moment, I was sorry. Then I lay back into it.
A House Is A Body
Not the scent of the smoke, but the sight of it, not the sight itself, but the screen through which it altered the sunlight—she couldn’t articulate the change exactly, it’s just that the light seemed odd, like the sour light of a nightmare. She had overslept. She was used to waking at the sound of his alarm. Risen dazed and blinking into this odd day, the cool and yellow morning. Before she woke the girl, she stood on the deck. I have use of my limbs, she thought, without knowing why she thought it. And went back into the house. She dressed the child, and combed her hair, and shook cereal into a bowl for her—the child seemed not to notice anything at all, still pliant with sleep, and ate without speaking but with an unfocused concentration she brought to most tasks, that she brought even to her dreams, her face concentrated even in the task of its dreaming, mirroring perhaps a dream-face that rarely smiled. It was too late now to hurry. And the girl ate slowly. The mother had the urge to smack her. She turned her eyes down to her mug of coffee and took a sip from it. Without milk or sugar it tasted only of acid. Drank. She was coming awake.
Where’s Daddy today? Halfway through the soggy bowl.
Went to work early. You know, he might get home late tonight. After you’re in bed.
I feel funny, said the girl.
Funny how.
Shrugged.
The mother put a testing hand against the silky forehead. You’re fine.
I feel funny.
No, she wasn’t fine, the forehead was hot. But jesus, god, just a moment alone, today of all days. Children made noise, the woman had been told, but nobody had ever told her that the noise children made would be intolerable. The noise they made, the sneezing and singing and screaming and shrieking—nothing wrong, when she raced to the other room, the child was shrieking with delight—and crying, crying, a scraped knee, a broken doll, and the crashing of toys and furniture and bodies, this noise was near constant, slowly growing throughout the waking hours, swelling in the afternoon to an evening crescendo, the noise under everything, diminishing every pure thought and action, the noise she could not quite block out but had to monitor for signs of true distress. Even alone, one child—christ, imagine two! looking down at the sick daughter. She was small, she was six years old, very small, but turning, already, or she should say finally human, with her own thoughts. Dark as her father, darker than him, the mother had not made a mark on her.
Okay. Stay home with me today. I’ll call the school. You go back to bed.
I don’t want to.
You go to school or you go back to bed.
No.
Don’t try me right now. The anger in her own voice scared her. The girl fled. Anika!
She called the school. Something going around. She was shaking. The anger in her voice sounded like her mother’s.
Anika?
She lay in her bed, still with her school clothes on, and pressed her face into the pillow. Now the mother was gentle, and stroked her back. The structure of her rib cage was like hands, ribs had an affinity with slender fingers. The little body contained a soul. She wasn’t crying, but her face was flushed.
Come let’s get you—
No!
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Let’s get you—Anika!—still—
For she was squirming, then shivering, as the woman lifted the dress over her head, and pulled down the tights. Her baby’s body gone skinny, the ribs, the dark chest, tiny nipples. Her pajamas were pink, they buttoned. She dressed the girl in them, then tucked the blankets around her.
Still cold?
She nodded.
You’ll warm up.
Read to me?
The same book, one they could both easily recite by memory (father too). The mother made herself patient. One winter morning, Peter woke up and looked out the window. The body beside her felt incandescent. She could have been sick the day before and the mother hadn’t noticed. Maybe even two days. Had she? Three pages and she was dozing. The mother shut the curtains and left the room. Out the window the sky was lambent: glowing, it seemed, from a diffuse source, and she went on the deck to gaze at it. The air felt dry in her throat. The hill sloped away from the house, bare for a mile and then trees, not tall enough to block the view yet, but they were creeping slowly upward, and one day would. The woman was remembering the hillside when it was green, and jeweled with newts bisected with purple and orange, with sideways eyes, cool on the palm, their movements slow with terror. The girl had caught them. Delighted. They lost their tails, she told her mother. If they were caught. Does it hurt? The mother didn’t know. What happens to the tail, does it become a whole new newt? The mother said maybe. And then the girl’s eyes lighting up with understanding: is that how humans are made too? Baby, the mother had asked, do we have tails? But rain had not come for months and months, and the hillside had browned—some would say become golden but she would say brown, and it was not bitterness, because she had felt this way for many years, steady in her hatred of summer.
The light was golden. As light should be but never is. Then she caught the first dark scent. Oh—what now? But the feeling was like wonder. Smoke? She was a body in air. As he was speaking, last night, she could hear the water in his mouth—his spit—she could hear the sounds of the mouth that happened around the words, of the lips opening and closing, of the tongue sliding, and occasionally the click of teeth. Under the sound of the words was the sound of breath, the breath that carried those words, so at first it was difficult to hear them, the words, and when she did hear them there was so much space around them she thought, “Well, I’m okay.” But later, only a little later, she realized that it had been shock. She had not let the words into her body. It was as though she had placed a pill on her tongue, could feel the weight of it there but could not yet taste it. Alone, in the almost empty house—for it was late at night, and the girl was sleeping—his words began to enter her: she tasted them, she felt the burning of their swallow, she felt them come into her bloodstream. She stood in front of the mirror. He had changed her, she wanted to see it. Her features were the same, but they had a different meaning now, she looked older, and sour, and she saw the lines on either side of her mouth, and traced them with her finger. The lines of her mother, her mother’s sourness. Oh god. And then she turned away from the mirror with a clenching, a balling up, for once her tears began to form she would not be able to stop them, for days she would live in a dazy red and swollen mind, stuffed up as if by cold, and eyes always leaking in betrayal.
Inside she turned on the TV for news, but there was nothing. Only soaps. Three channels came in, and a Spanish channel, and a Christian one. Switched it off. And restless. She went into the child’s room. Sick, the girl was docile, hers, she was her mother’s but not her own, too docile, suffering, but the face in sleep was angelic. She had forgotten to take her temperature like a bad mother, she had not given her any medicine like a bad mother. Should she wake her? But didn’t the body need sleep most of all? She had thought of the drive to school with her daughter, pulling to the curb, and watching her walk into the stone building. Past that, she had not thought, but likely she would have ended up at the ocean. Walking, walking, or just sitting in the car, dry, watching the sea fold over. Where was he. Work, or.
Startled by a knock at the door, she looked through the window in the kitchen and saw a man standing in uniform. He started speaking as soon as she opened the door, polite but with little preamble: the hillside was burning. Far off but uncontained, growing in the other direction: still. Are you all right?
She nodded. She was not sure what shape her face had been in to make him ask.
It’s not going to come this close. I promise you.
Then why do we have to leave? She heard herself speaking like a child. The man had a face, she noticed, a young face, dark with stubble, the kind of man who couldn’t keep his chin clean. The eyes of the man were amber with pity under his hat.
Just a precaution. Really. There’s no need to be afraid.
Do we have enough water?
What?
To put the fire out.
Helicopters, he said, come from the lake.
Is there enough water in the lake?
No need to worry. We’re just being extra careful.
Don’t cry now, she told herself. Then it won’t stop. She watched his Jeep turn in the drive and she waved to him.
She stood looking dumbly at the possessions they had gathered and arranged. Each thing was in its place with few subtractions; he had taken only a few shirts and pants and a beloved sweater she sometimes borrowed and two books (he didn’t read often, and they were just paperbacks, easily replaceable). Each thing was in its place and clean because she had just cleaned. She liked to scrub the kitchen floor on her hands and knees: he liked it too. She went to the kitchen and opened the utensils drawer and looked down at the spoons. Which should she take? Would they melt? She began to take them out of the drawer and put them in a paper bag with handles. And then the forks. Not the real knives with teeth but the gentle butter knives, made for spreading. Then she took out the utensil holder and put that in the bag too. Undressed, the drawer looked unsettling. She took off her wedding ring and put it in the drawer and closed it, hard, she could hear the gold ping against the wood.
Mommy.
In the doorway of her room as if in the frame of a picture: but who would paint a child like this, skinny and wary—the eyes of it oddly yellow. Her baby.
Go back to bed, Ani.
I was sick in the bed.
What?
I was sick.
She had spit up, like a baby, her breakfast, sour in the sheets, and on her nightclothes. The mother undressed her and pulled the foul clothes off the bed. Heat came off the body of the child as it would a radiator. Now the mother would be a good mother, lifting the girl, who smelled sweet in her hair, and taking her to the bathroom, and running a bath, as she waited, wrapped in a towel on the toilet to keep warm. The mother poured a spoon of blue medicine down the girl’s throat, bitter, but she told the girl of Shiva’s heroism, sucking the poison from the ocean as it was churned by the gods for nectar, and holding it in his dark throat so the rest would not be harmed. Will I turn blue?
No, love. Why so tender? And tears suddenly rising. In you go.
Have I been bad?
No.
Then why are you crying?
You’re just sick. Sometimes when people are sick they throw up. It’s okay.
She washed her daughter’s hair. The girl was having trouble keeping upright and wanted to lie down. Her head bubbled under the water for a few seconds as it followed its own weight. Almost, said the mother, patting her body dry. She brought a too-big T-shirt for the girl and slipped her arms and neck through it. Forcing her tears back into her eyes took all her effort. But she wiped her face and turned to the girl and smiled. Okay, Ani, back to bed.
In her parents’ bed the child looked tiny.
The man looked disappointed when she opened the door. The open door let in the friendly smell of smoke, the kind that perfumed the hair of campers.
I fell asleep! she said.
The thing is, the fire’s turned. We’re evacuating everyone now.
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Is the lake dry?
He rubbed his chin. They’re dumping mud.
I have to pack.
There’s not much time now.
No time to pack?
Ten minutes, he said, okay?
Fifteen?
No, ten. Five. But I can’t come back here to make sure you’re out, you should be out already. Will you be out in ten minutes?
Like a child she was making him a solemn promise. Could he see that underneath her skull was glinting with laughter? But she straightened herself: she was a serious woman. She set an egg-timer. His car raised dust as it turned.
A house is a body, a body houses souls. Three souls but now there were only two. The house did not betray pain. She would just as well let the photographs burn, but the girl would want them one day. What would the girl want? It was time, past time, to call him, but still she did not. She filled a paper bag with books and when she lifted it by the handles it tore in half. Once I had been beautiful. Not all at once but for a day at a time. And now—
Outside the yellow of the air had intensified, the light had thickened from golden to something more. There was no time, but she stepped onto the deck anyway, and held her arm out, it had changed color. Her skin looked eerie, ruined. She could not see the fire from where she stood, but the smell in the air had deepened, that good smell, the clean smell of wood releasing its carbon. And the aircraft hauling water from the lake thrusting their noise into the morning. They were small as insects.
Anika?
She was sleeping with her mouth open, she couldn’t pull open her eyes, she was sweating her kid’s sweat at her brow, the gentle kind of sweat that smelled like clay. The bad mother had forgotten to take her daughter’s temperature, but to take it now she would have to wake her, and she couldn’t remember if she should; it had been at least a year since the girl was so sick, maybe longer, her colds were mild and almost sweet, cured, it seemed, by a day of rest, hot tea, baby aspirin, and a mother or father sitting on the bed and singing, badly (mother) or beautifully (father). She didn’t trust the internet, but Dr. Spock would know, she went to the shelf and remembered she’d emptied it into the bag, she rifled through the spilt bag and found him, flipped to the index, fever, fever, and then to the page it directed. It was a good sign if your child was sleeping, if she was able to sleep then the fever wasn’t so severe and you must not wake her. Still, it was alarming to put her hand against the cheek or the forehead of the little girl—surely she had never been this hot. At the child’s neck the skin prickled up in the shape of a continent, raised and slightly purple. She winced when it was touched by the mother’s gentle fingers and the skin under the fingers: even hotter. Spock? Now don’t get hysterical. He only took one suitcase so she could still pack, none of these paper ripping bags. And then they’d drive straight down to the hospital and she’d call him from there. The egg-timer sounded, she cranked it again, generously granting herself more time as though she had the power to grant it.