Slice of Cherry

by Dia Reeves

  FROM FANCY’S DREAM DIARY:

  MADDA TOOK US TO A CEMETERY FULL OF DADDY’S VICTIMS. KIT GOT MAD EVERY TIME ME AND MADDA PUT FLOWERS ON THEIR GRAVES. SHE KEPT SAYING, CAN’T YOU HEAR THEM SCREAMING DOWN THERE?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The sisters made it home fresh and clean and just in time to have breakfast with Madda. They’d brought Selenicera with them, since it was on the way to the bus station, and hid her in their inner room while they visited with Madda and picked at a breakfast they didn’t want. After Madda finally bedded down for the day, they snuck Selenicera out of the house and walked her about a mile down El Camino Real to the bus station, a tired wooden building that was more of a hut than a station. After Selenicera called her brother in Houston and told him to meet her at the bus station there, Kit paid for her bus ticket and even gave her extra cash in case she wanted to buy a snack on her way to her brother’s house.

  The sisters would have left then, but Selenicera had about an hour to wait. She was a different girl from the one they’d rescued from Datura’s weird garden room: a butterfly—even without the wings—healthy, but scarily fragile. So without saying anything, the sisters settled on a bench to wait for the bus. Kit went into the station and bought a pair of pink hair ribbons and passed the time playing with Fancy’s hair while Selenicera amused herself by hopscotching in and out of the sunlight.

  When a dusty bus finally wheezed to a stop before the station, Selenicera hurried onto it. Fancy wasn’t surprised that she was in such a hurry to quit them, but she was surprised when Selenicera opened a window and leaned out to say thanks.

  “You’re welcome.” Kit shuffled her feet, a sheepish grin on her face. “Sorry about trying to kill you back there. Nothing personal.”

  “I know,” Selenicera said gravely, turned slightly toward the sun. “You’re like rottweilers—they protect you from burglars, but nothing protects you from them.”

  Fancy found that hilarious, but Kit didn’t.

  “A rottweiler?” she exclaimed as the bus pulled out of sight through the trees. “Is that how people see me?”

  The sisters ditched the road and took the long way back down Sayer’s Trail through the woods so they could eat the ripe, shiny blackberries that grew along the path.

  “You’re more like a golden goose than a dog,” said Fancy. “Letting everybody get rich off us.”

  “Huh?”

  “We shouldn’t be shelling out money, paying our clients’ expenses—”

  “Clients?”

  “We provide a service.” They had to walk single file over the wooden bridge that spanned the creek below as squirrels dashed across the branches over their heads. “We should be getting paid.”

  “Forget money, Fancy. We’re supposed to be helping people.”

  “Doesn’t mean we have to end up in the poorhouse. And that’s another thing: Why’d you take all that money from the treasure chest?”

  Kit’s steps faltered guiltily.

  “You think I wouldn’t notice that we’re short over two hundred dollars? What’d you spend the money on?”

  “Just some . . . music stuff.”

  “Music stuff like what? The Dallas Symphony Orchestra?”

  “It’s my money too.”

  “Our money. And I got my own plans, you know.”

  Kit snorted. “You still trying to sail the seven seas?”

  “The South Seas. And shut up.” They left the bridge, Fancy in front, wishing it was always as easy to lead Kit.

  Behind her Kit said, “Maybe instead of sailing we could do something normal. Like get after-school jobs.”

  Fancy whirled and walked backward to watch Kit in disbelief. “Doing what?”

  “I could teach piano and you could . . . what can you do?”

  “Kill people. Same as you.”

  “Maybe it’s time to do something else.”

  Fancy tripped over her own feet and fell backward into a patch of gory Annas. Kit had already knocked all the wind out of her, so the fall was anticlimactic. As Kit came forward to help her up, the ground exploded in a billowing cloud of petals. A pair of hands bloomed in the middle of the path like grisly flowers—more grisly than the gory Annas themselves, which resembled flaring white skirts with red dots like blood at the hem—and latched hold of Kit’s bare ankles.

  Kit screeched and tried to skip backward, but the hands were holding her too tightly, were in fact climbing her legs hand over hand, as though she were a rope dangling from the school gym ceiling. As the corpse rose, Fancy noted more details. Its bones were visible in places, and the flesh that remained was a mottled gray color. It was wearing a tattered black dress.

  Fancy scrambled forward in the dirt and grabbed the corpse to try to pull it off her sister, but couldn’t. Instead she came away with a handful of dress, which crumbled to dust in her fist. She grabbed the legs but let go in disgust, rubbing her palms on the front of her jumper. The corpse’s skin had felt wet and somehow loose.

  Kit, however, after that initial screech, stood oddly silent in the literal grip of a nightmare. The corpse was standing, holding her by the shoulders. Its fingernails were painted a glittery blue. It looked Kit in the eye, although the corpse’s own eyes were gone. It opened its lipless mouth and spoke:

  “Will you ease my pain?” A ghostly feminine voice soughed in the woods, as if the air itself spoke instead of a corpse whose lungs some animal had long since nibbled out of existence.

  Kit had to swallow before she could answer. “Yes.”

  “My mother doesn’t know where I am. She cries for me.” The wind blew its dress to dust and made Fancy cough.

  “What’s her name? How do I find her?”

  “Amelia Dandridge. 824 St. Teresa. Tell her where I am. Tell her I didn’t run away.”

  “I will.”

  As though Kit’s promise were magic words, the corpse sank back into the ground. Fancy thought of the spongy earth in the Headless Garden and felt a moment of surreality. “We didn’t accidentally wander into the happy place for a few minutes and then wander back out, did we?”

  Kit laughed, a skittering sound that revealed that she wasn’t as calm as she seemed. “I should be the one asking you that.” She collapsed on the path, rocking herself and smothering her giggles until tears stood in her eyes. Fancy knelt beside her, not liking to kneel over the corpse but having no choice. “Kit, shh. It’s okay.”

  “I know it’s okay. Remember what Madda said? The thing Big Mama could do? What Cherry herself could do? Me! I can do that. Did you see that? I settled a corpse. I laid her to rest.” Simple amazement overcame her giggling fit. “I did it. I mean, I’m about to. As soon as I tell her mother. Damn. I didn’t ask what her name was.”

  “Greenley.” The ghostly voice seeped from the ground.

  Fancy shot to her feet and would have taken off except that Kit stayed on the ground and laughed.

  “She’s dead, remember? She can’t hurt us.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Kit untied the ribbon she’d put in her sister’s hair and then drove a sharpened twig into the ground.

  “Why did those bones grab you?” Fancy asked, her black hair floating willy-nilly about her face. She felt willy-nilly too, as though Kit had undone some stabilizing cord between them. “I walked over that same spot and nothing grabbed me.”

  Kit tied the ribbon around the stick in a jaunty bow. “You can see things in glasses of water and I can’t. Same thing.” She pulled her sister along the path, her hand gritty with dust and dirt. They left the beribboned twig behind like a girly grave marker.

  “Why’re you grinning like that?” asked Fancy, skipping to keep up with Kit’s loping stride.

  “Cuz I’m not useless.”

  “Who said you were?”

  “And cuz I can do something you can’t.”

  Fancy stopped skipping. “You don’t have to be all happy about it.”

  “Sorry!” cried Kit.

  Ha
ppily.

  * * *

  That afternoon the sisters went to the square where Amelia Dandridge lived—St. Teresa Avenue to be precise. On the corner of St. Teresa and Third, a boy running a dark peach juice stand called out, “You girls need luck?” The dark peaches that grew downsquare were notoriously lucky, so dark peach juice was always popular. The boy wore an Uncle Sam hat and had a crowd of people lined up, waiting in the hot sun.

  The juice was warm and almost medicinally sweet, but dark peach juice wasn’t popular because of its taste. Porterenes didn’t believe in magic, but they believed in having all the good luck they could get.

  Kit stopped before the stand and smiled at the boy. “What do you say, Fancy?”

  Fancy shrugged and rolled her eyes, knowing that Kit wouldn’t have felt so in need of luck had the boy not been cute.

  “Fancy?” said the boy, handing out plastic cups of pale golden liquid with one hand and snatching dollars with the other. “And Kit? The Cordelle sisters?”

  The crowd of people stilled and stared. “Yeah?” Kit said as the sisters braced themselves for an attack.

  “Y’all need more than luck,” he said solemnly, handing the sisters their drinks. “Y’all need a miracle. Your old man’s toast. Too bad he couldn’t be more like y’all.”

  Kit, who had been on the verge of exploding, was shocked out of her anger. “Like us?”

  “We heard about Mason,” one of the waiting customers told her. “And Selie.”

  “You know Selenicera?”

  “She took ballet with my kid until Datura . . .”

  “Went apeshit?” Kit suggested. She exchanged a look with Fancy, who couldn’t believe that instead of screaming for the cops, everyone was smiling at them.

  “On the house, ladies,” said the peach juice boy after the sisters drank up. “With any luck you’ll find out you were adopted.”

  “With any luck,” said Kit, “you’ll realize you’re an asshole. That way strangers won’t have to constantly point it out to you. Thanks for the drink!”

  They walked their bikes down St. Teresa, past the cathedral of the same name where a couple of Blue Sisters conversed on the steps in their grayish-blue habits. “You wanna go back and get him?” Fancy said under her voice as they passed the sisters.

  Kit frowned. “What for?”

  “For saying that about Daddy. We could take him to the happy place. Really put the fear of God into him.”

  “Fuck him.”

  Fancy glanced back nervously at the sisters, but they didn’t seem to have heard. “You almost killed a little girl for less reason than he just gave you.”

  “I can’t show up at a stranger’s house covered in blood—I wasn’t raised in a barn.” Kit was distracted, searching the house numbers for 824. “Besides, it’s like you said: If we went after every rude person, we’d have to go after everybody in town.”

  “I say a lot of stuff you never listen to.” “Well, I’m listening now.” A group of kids raced by, waving tiny American flags and sparklers. “After I do this thing with Amelia, you wanna go to Fountain Square?”

  “What for?”

  “To hang out, dummy. It’s the Fourth of July.” When Fancy just stared, dumbstruck, Kit huffed, “Forget I said anything.”

  Kit stopped at a row house that had been converted to apartments. When Fancy tried to follow Kit up the stoop, Kit put up her hand.

  “You should go on home.”

  “It’s too hot for jokes, Kit. Let’s get this over with so we can leave.”

  “It’s over right now, Fancy, for you.”

  Kit was wearing Madda’s my way or the highway expression, and that’s how Fancy knew she was serious. “Why do you wanna send me away?”

  “You freak people out, Fancy,” she said in the reluctant tone used to inform someone she had bad breath. “The way you sit all quiet, hating everybody. I can put Amelia at ease a lot easier without you there looking at her.”

  “But we do everything together! You came to the happy place with me.”

  “Because you asked me to. Now I’m asking you to go home.”

  “Why wait until I’m all the way out here to say that?”

  “I didn’t wanna hurt your feelings.” “But now it’s okay?”

  Kit turned her back and went into the building. Didn’t even apologize, didn’t even pretend to feel bad about ditching her own sister. That Kit could care about a stranger’s feelings over her own blew Fancy’s mind.

  “Fine. Don’t include me. See if I care.” As soon as the door closed behind Kit, Fancy yelled. “And don’t say ‘fuck’!”

  FROM FANCY’S DREAM DIARY:

  KIT WAS RUNNING AHEAD OF ME THROUGH THE WOODS ON A PATH MADE OF PINK GLASS. I TRIED TO KEEP UP BUT MY LEGS WEREN’T AS SWIFT AS HERS AND THE GLASS BROKE UNDER THE WEIGHT OF MY FEET, BLOODYING THEM, BUT KIT STILL WOULDN’T SLOW DOWN. WHEN I FELL, THE GLASS SHATTERED ALL AROUND ME AND CUT ME INTO SEVENTEEN PIECES.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Madda was so thrilled that Kit was carrying on the family tradition of settling the dead that she made her special red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting. To Fancy it tasted like creek mud.

  “You’re quiet tonight,” Madda said, finally noticing her. “What’s wrong?”

  “She’s always quiet,” said Kit.

  “Quieter.” Madda put her palm against Fancy’s forehead. “Are you sick?”

  Fancy nodded and let Madda put her to bed.

  Kit came in some time later and sat next to Fancy in the dark.

  “You woulda been bored. Amelia just cried a lot and hugged me. It was all very emotional and tragic—you woulda hated it.”

  “I hate you. I’m sick with it. I’m gone die in this bed hating you. Just like Uncle Miles.”

  “Uncle Miles died of the flu, not hate. Stupid girl. You won’t die. You’re way too evil and ornery, but if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll watch over you.”

  “All night?”

  “I’ll be here.” Kit climbed into bed with her and pulled her close, rubbing her back in slow circles.

  Fancy fell asleep listening to Kit’s heartbeat. Her dreams were strange and blackberry scented, and every time she woke up, Kit was there, watching her.

  But the next day, Kit was gone. Fancy opened her eyes to late-morning sunshine and two notes on the nightstand:

  Sorry I missed you at breakfast.

  Feel better, sweetie.

  And:

  Watching you sleep is like watching

  paint dry. Gonna find something

  exciting to do. Be back soon.

  Exciting?

  Fancy rolled out of bed and looked into the vanity mirror and saw Kit riding her bike, face turned up to the sun, a smile on her face like she was happy. Even without Fancy by her side she was happy. Fancy got dressed and left the house. If Kit wanted to be happy without her, she’d find a way to be happy without Kit.

  Fancy rode her bike into the square and stopped at the music store, secretly hoping to see Kit there, but Kit was nowhere in sight. Fancy rifled listlessly through scratched vinyl records.

  “Hey, Fancy.”

  It was the shop owner, an older lady with wavy hair, a hippy skirt, and rings on her toes. Kit knew her name, but Fancy didn’t—she’d never paid attention. “Someone donated a bunch of Louis Armstrong LPs, if you’re interested.”

  Fancy went to where the shop owner was pointing.

  “Is it true that you went mute after Guthrie was put away?”

  The shop owner was watching her, but Fancy didn’t mind— she had a nice face and weird taste in music, which Fancy always appreciated. Fancy gave her a scornful look.

  The shop owner laughed. “People have lots of theories, don’t they? Do you get hate mail?”

  Fancy looked up, surprised.

  “So do I. I was married ten years to a child molester, and no one believes that I didn’t somehow know that he was hurting children. He does the crime; I get all the hate. They a
lways take it out on the wrong person. All the sympathy gets used up on the victims, and so there’s never any left over for innocent bystanders.”

  “I’m not innocent,” said Fancy without thinking, moved by the shop owner’s lurid confession. “Maybe that’s why they hate us. For reminding them that innocence is just an illusion, and that if you scratch the surface, we’re dark and maggoty all the way down to the bone. We’re animals, and we’re guilty— every one of us.”

  Fancy brought a record up to the counter—Louis Armstrong’s version of “On the Sunny Side of the Street”—but the shop owner wouldn’t take her money.

  “On the house. Isn’t your sister gone meet you?” She looked out of the shop door as if a line of beasties were waiting out on the sidewalk for Fancy to exit. “You shouldn’t go around alone.”

  Fancy wished there were beasties. “I don’t care if I get eaten.”

  “Kit would care,” said the shop owner, as if she knew anything about Kit’s feelings. “Did y’all have a fight?”

  Fancy shrugged.

  “It’s okay to fight, honey.” She grabbed a bag for Fancy’s record. “If you don’t fight, you never realize how much the people you love mean to you. She’ll come to her senses. You come back soon, huh? It’s nice to talk to someone who appreciates the joys of utter despair.”

  Fancy thought about this. “Okay.”

  She left the store, marveling at how easy that had been, how almost natural to walk away from an encounter with someone without wanting to hurt or maim.

  How strange.

  When Fancy got home, Kit was sitting at the piano, playing softly and singing into the phone cradled between her face and shoulder. Fancy recognized the song—they had the record in the crate beneath the phonograph. “I Wanna Be Loved by You” by Helen Kane.

  Kit sang it giggling into the phone, but then the words took on a deep meaning, her voice full of longing. When Kit saw Fancy glaring at her, though, she straightened, nearly dropping the phone. “Uh, I’ll call you back.”

  Kit stood, put the phone in the charger, and followed Fancy into the sleeping porch. “Hey. Where you been?”