~~**~~
She and Jeremy had met at Rose Books. That day, she was in the crafts section, examining volumes on the fashioning of candles, what equipment she’d need, how long it would take, what the flashpoint was for paraffin. She thought of Edna, sitting in her Three Bears rocking chair, watching the flames. What makes wax burn, Mohma? she’d asked. And why is it hot?
“I make candles,” a man said. “That isn’t really the book you want.”
She turned, startled from her examination of Waxwork Basics. Before her was Jeremy and his white flame of hair. In his hands, he cradled a biography of Mucha and a black Moleskine with scraps thrusting from it like tongues.
“What you really want,” he reached for a book on a shelf above her head, “is this one.” He presented her with copy of Candlemaster’s Bible. “It’s more expensive, but you’ll get more burn for your buck.”
She clutched both of them, wishing she’d washed her hair and brushed her teeth; that morning had been too nauseous with sorrow. “All of this is so expensive.”
“It depends on what you’re going to make. What you’re planning on doing.” There was a mole on his upper lip, a squished heart on its side, like the ones Lucy had squeezed from the frosting tubes when she’d made her special Valentine’s Day cookies. Mohma, I’m making hearts. “I have lots of molds,” he said. “Nice ones. Special-ordered ones. But now, I make candles in my own shapes. I . . . make my own molds.”
Her gaze fell to his belt buckle, which was in the shape of the state of Rhode Island. “I was looking for faces,” she said, blinking back up at him, at the swath of freckles across the bridge of his nose.
He rested the books in his hands on his waist, covering the buckle. “You know, I might have some older molds I don’t use anymore.”
“Oh, I don’t know if you’d have what I need.”
“I might.”
She looked nervously toward the door of Rose Books, into the intense silver of rain, and then down at her feet, shocked to see she’d worn her black velvet slippers that were only meant as house-shoes. She was sweating. “It’s like a veil out there.”
He motioned with the book. “I just live upstairs.”
She opened her mouth, prepared to say no, she had to be getting back, and then she remembered there was no one home to miss her.
She left her unpurchased books on a table that identified itself as an Unwanted Potentials Depository and followed him up the flight of worn stairs. His door bore a burn hole, and despite her horror she touched it and felt the splintered wood as he stuck a key into the lock.
“Wax fire. It hit its flash point.” He looked up at her, jiggling the key, then pushed on the door; it didn’t move. “It’s—it’s only happened to me”—he worked the glass knob—“one other time.” He shoved with his shoulder, and the door banged open.
The room beyond opened up in a canyon of cornflower walls. The kitchen stove was shimmed crooked, and spattered with yellow and pink wax; small appliances, pots and pans, and metal thermometers littered the countertops. Against one wall, a mail holder had been converted into a dispenser for three spools of string, and a pair of scissors hung under a grimy light switch. The couch and recliner, the coffee table were buried under rainbow piles of candles; birds, fish, flowers, and seashells, moose, deer, Bibles and wreaths tumbled to the floor like colored stones.
“Sorry there’s nowhere to sit. You can have one of those candles from that mess, if you want.” He disappeared down a hallway. Somewhere, she heard a clock ticking, but it seemed to be stuck, because a buzz like the hornets in her yard kicked in every few seconds. She plucked a wax bird from the pile and stroked its milky back.
Jeremy emerged from the room with a box, one side of it smeared black. “You might find what you’re looking for in here. They’re still good—I’m pretty sure I didn’t use them as many times as possible before they recommend you get rid of ’em. Want to see my latest work? Come on.” He went over to the bathroom. “I just keep this in the shower so it’s out of the way.”
The bathroom window was shrouded with a wax-speckled sheet, but when he flipped a switch, work lights made up for the lack of sunlight. What was most strange were the walls, plaqued with thumb-tacked photos of young women and old men, of children hugging stuffed toys.
When he swept back the shower curtain, she gasped: a six-foot wax mermaid cast her eyes to the ceiling. She remembered Amarinthe, who had once taken a trash bag, glued glitter on it, tied it around her waist and romped about the house. I’m a mermaid, Mohma!
“I recognize her,” she said.
“Yes, you would. Her face is Elsa, owner of Rose Books.”
She touched the brown-sugar dollops on the figure’s breasts. “It’s beautiful.”
“I study the face, and then I craft a mold.” He reached up to the face and picked at something on the wax cheek. “I do these in metal because I like to smith, and I find metal molds produce better detail. I shop for women’s garments and fashion body parts from those, and then I make each piece and melt the seams together, then smooth them over. Here.” He reached out to her, cupped her trembling fingers, pressed them lightly on the wax creature’s breastbone. “You can’t even feel it there.”
The warmth of his hand was such an unfamiliar thing, as alien to her as a smile, and the tickle of corn silk hair, and the chirrup of giggles. He moved her fingers across the wax as deftly as the hand of a blind man might hover over braille; she was behind the ear and down the hair, across the waist and circling the shoulder: he was showing her the seams, the places where she could be taken apart.
He stopped at the crease of the mermaid’s eye, let go of her hand, and exhaled. “It’s the second one I’ve done that emerged as a good likeness.”
“Who came through before?” she asked.
“Mom.” He pulled the shower curtain closed, and she withdrew her hand as though stung. “It was her birthday present.” He strode into the living room, lifted her box of molds onto a table, brought them back toward her, and pulled them out, one by one; like mismatched shoes, they landed on the counter, abreast of a stack of newspaper clippings and photo albums. “You know, she never brought herself to burn it? She said it would be a bad omen. I told her nothing was a bad omen. If bad things are going to happen, they’ll happen. You can’t create trouble for yourself. At least, that was what I thought.” He stopped cradling one of the molds, holding it up in the darkening light from the windows. He ran his finger along its chin, its drawn, thin-lipped expression. “I was teaching her how to melt wax when it happened,” he said. “It just—everything went up so fast. It was my fault. I should’ve been watching.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I’m sorry too.” He offered her the mold, his hand over his mother’s eyes. “About your girls. I was living here. I watched the fire engines.”
She pulled the face against her breasts as he wiped his hands on his jeans, frosted with melted wax. He brushed past her, his words suddenly urgent. “I’m going to give you my card”—he was mining a pile of magazines and papers on the counter—“and if you have any questions about making candles or where to go to get wax—Waximillion up in Providence carries the highest quality stuff—or you could order it on the internet, but I don’t always trust what I’m buying—”
Her feet were cold, suddenly. “I want you to do it,” she said.
He ceased and looked up at her, and the stack on the counter toppled to the floor like a cascading waterfall. “Uh . . . my people are . . . they’re not for sale. I just do that as a project, really; it was therapy, kind of.”
She nodded toward his refrigerator, where several bills with threatening red stripes were pinioned beneath kitchen magnets. “A gift, then. I’ll make a donation.”
Outside, there was a timpani of thunder, and the lamp on his corner table dimmed.
~~**~~
It rained an angry deluge with a sound like a horde of frogs slapping the roof, and up in the room with
the pineapple wallpaper, she extinguished the flames and waited for Jeremy; she pressed her nose against that omnipresent thick glass, brushing aside the drapes that were stitched in Revolutionary War silhouettes.
He drove up in his sky blue truck; rust spots gnawed at its back wheel well. In the bed a tarp shrouded four lumps.
She watched him leap up the steps, and when she pulled open the front door, she found his weathered hand curled in a fist, about to knock. “They’re here,” he said.
She frowned, not at him, but at the burn swath down the front of his jacket. She touched it, rubbed the cracker-crisp leather under her fingers.
He pulled her hand away. “This is . . . what I was wearing. The day she burned.”
There was nothing between them until the boards above their heads creaked.
“I’ll, uh . . . help you put them in the garden,” he said.
“No,” she said. “Just set them on the rocks over there. I can move them myself.”
He nodded and turned back to the truck, and she pulled her checkbook from the letter table drawer, thinking she could not put a price on what he’d given her. She thought of the hospital bills from when she’d given birth to her girls and wrote him a check for the balance of what she had left in her account.
The next day, she set blue-wax Lucy, whom Jeremy had fashioned sporting a smear of glitter and a blush of chocolate cake as on her second birthday, among the tiger lilies. And she set lavender Edna, cross-legged and reaching for a butterfly as in the photo of her romping through a corn maze, in the patch of her garden populated with dead sunflower stalks. And yellow Amarinthe, who was fixing her hair and pulling down the brim of a floppy hat she’d stolen from Mohma’s closet on Halloween, Amarinthe she set down by the stream that burbled behind the leaning shed. And because she herself did not have a favorite spot or a favorite child, she set the likeness of herself where it could see them all.
It poured, and when the last raindrop rolled off the tiger lily petals and a shaft of April sun parted the pigeon gray, she pulled a key from her bra. She unlocked the steel box on her fireplace mantel and held the matches in her palm. Then she went out to the lawn, and she lit her girls, and she watched them burn, and she wept that she was sorry, but that she would see them soon.
HAIRLESS GIRL DOES THE HULA
A woman drowned in the Kahiki Moon Resort’s Volcano Pool this morning.
This means the waitresses—like me—and performers at the resort’s nightly luau can revel in a paid day off. Since central Florida’s rocking a serious heat wave, I’m gonna splash through it in my apartment complex’s pool.
Some of us aren’t so lucky. Like Toke—his real name is Tokala, or something else no one wants to pronounce—whose pool is undergoing refurbishment.
Speaking of hot—Toke, the show’s senior fire knife dancer, is muscled, tan, and carries himself so the one missing tooth in the corner of his mouth is actually sexy. All the waitresses and hula girls pine for him, but since the heat wave’s cusp he’s been winking at me, even going out of his way to talk to me.
So you can imagine how psyched I was when he actually called and asked if he could come over to my place and swim in my pool. And better, could I come pick him up, his car’s radiator cracked and it’s at the shop.
“She’s got nice legs, Hailey. But her spring’s showing.” Toke chucks a toweled bundle in my Toyota’s back seat.
“What?” Then I realize he’s referring to the wobbling hula dancer figurine tacked to my dashboard. Her red grass skirt has come unglued at the seam.
“She’s only got legs up to her thighs. There’s a spring where her gut should be. You should Krazy Glue her.”
I look more closely. I’d envisioned a full body under there—in fact, I’d even been curious about how they’d handled her you-know-what—but never checked. “Oh, shit.” I key the ignition and twist my body to back up the car. “I bought that at the Kahiki and paid like fifteen bucks for it.”
“Fifteen bucks? Christ. Coulda got one down at Eli’s Orange World for two.”
“Yeah, they had chintzy tourist stuff. I really liked this one. There was something about her.”
“Looks like you, maybe?”
I blush as we turn onto Route 192. Truth is, she looks like I wish I did. My long black hair, unbeknownst to everybody, is a wig. I have alopecia universalis, which means I’m bald and have no hair anywhere on my body. I learned how to draw pretty good eyebrows, wear fake eyelashes, and have worn a wig my whole life. Nowadays, there are permanent hair implants, and I’ve saved whenever I can so someday I will look like her, for real. But I’m still a ways off—my piggy bank, just like everyone’s, gets the change punched out of it now and then. “She does, you know. Look like you.” He fingers my cheek.
Holy crap, is he really touching me? I think of the huge balls of fire he passes between his legs and whips around his torso. “Really?”
“Sure.” He pulls a cigarette from his pocket, rams it in his mouth, and lights it. His fingers feather the tips of my hair.
Please, dear God, let the wig hold . . .
If guys find out I have no hair, they won’t want me—this I know.
My last year at junior high, there was this guy Peter in my geology class. We’d flirted for weeks, and on a quarry field trip, I’d just uncovered a rare trilobite when he asked me to the eighth grade dance.
That night, I was dancing with my head on his shoulder and my wig shifted and came off. Back then wigs—even expensive ones—just weren’t as well made as they are today. Consequently, my dreamboat in the blue tuxedo ran out. I stood in the middle of the floor, the circling spotlight beaming off my bald head.
No boy came near me after that. I’m still a virgin.
So I’m sure Toke’ll turn off if he finds out. He’ll never wink at me again, and the highlight of my work shift—where pretty much all I do is restock all-you-can-eat platters of pineapple bread and Polynesian rice—will be collecting my tips at the end of the night.
We pass the Chick-fil-A. Toke flips on the radio and out blasts a reggae version of “Slave to Love.” The hula dancer bobbles away—I swear, for just one second, her eyes flash red.
Probably just a weird effect of the sun.
~~**~~
I call the Augustus Apartments—a garden-style community done in reds, golds, marble, and fountains—home.
“This place’s nice.” Toke brushes his fingers along a mosaic.
“I think it’s supposed to look a little like Pompeii before it was torched or something,” I say. “Part of its charm.”
I unlock my apartment’s door and a wall of hot air nearly knocks me over.
“Guess it’s supposed to feel like Pompeii too?” He retrieves a fluorescent orange piece of paper that’s been shoved under my door. The air conditioning units are undergoing routine maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience. “Who the hell does routine maintenance in the middle of a heat wave?” He hurls his stuff on my rattan couch, plops down, and props his feet on my glass-topped coffee table.
I flush with embarrassment. “I guess the same people who choose to refurbish the swimming pool in the middle of summer?”
“Nice.”
Silence as I rummage in my kitchen. There’s an odd tension in my body, a pit in my stomach, and my fingers shake as I open a cabinet, stare, and forget what I’m looking for.
He’s watching me. He’s unbuttoned his tropical shirt and for the first time I notice the small tattoo of a fox on his left pectoral muscle. Offer him a drink, you idiot. Nothing comes out. I clear my throat. “Um, can I get you something?”
He sits forward. “In a minute. I’ll get changed.”
He vanishes into my bedroom, but leaves the door ajar; when I glance over, I can see him in the mirror. He drops his shorts. I flush and try to think of a drink I can make—what booze do I have in the house? I should look, but I can’t stop peering at his—
—he turns so he can see me, and I pivot and crouch
to check out my liquor stash, which I keep in the lazy Susan. Rum, amaretto, butterscotch schnapps, Southern Comfort . . . okay, I know . . .
“What’s this?”
“What’s what?” I pull out each bottle and set it on the counter above my head.
“Trophy.”
I’d forgotten that was there—hadn’t even thought to put it away. It’s not something I like people to know about.
“Oh, it’s nothing.” I stand and close the cabinet door. “I won first place in a contest when I was in high school.”
I glance over my shoulder; he’s vanished from the mirror.
“Pineapple Princess, huh.” He emerges from the bedroom and leans against the doorjamb. He’s wearing a tank top that says great balls of fire and an orange pair of swim trunks.
God, he’s hot.
“For hula?” He crosses his arms. “Think you’d be proud of that.”
“It was a long time ago.” I reach into the refrigerator and grab a can of pineapple juice—I’d opened it last week, so it might be a little sour, but with all that booze I don’t think we’ll notice.
“How come you didn’t try out to be a performer?”
“It’s not my thing, really.” I lie and concentrate on measuring shots, dumping them in the blender.
“Sure. But being a waitress is.”
“It’s fine.” I screw the cap back on the rum and reach for the amaretto.
“There’s an opening. Right now. Turned down a girl just yesterday, in fact. I’d get you an audition.”
I finish with the amaretto, add the SoCo.
“You’d get more respect around there.”
He walks toward me.
“And.” He leans over the breakfast bar. “You’d make more money. Real money. Three times what you make now. At least.”
This stops me. Three times what I make now . . . at least . . . it’d be possible to save more than just on occasion, and that implant wouldn’t be a someday dream anymore.
The Shadows Behind Page 9