The Coffins of Little Hope Read online

  “You’ll be guilty of theft,” Elvis said one midnight, flipping over the next card in a stack of tarot. He and Daisy sat on her bed, a week or so before he left with Lenore, and Elvis told her fortune. The moon cast enough light against the bed to see by. Playful, he predicted for her a shellfish allergy, braces on her teeth, and a tawdry affair with a bearded lady.

  It was sweltering in the house—a sultry, humid July night—and Elvis had stripped down to his boxers, and Daisy had put on a ratty, threadbare baby doll. They sucked on chips of ice.

  “Theft,” Daisy said, surprising Elvis with a page of the final book, taking it from where she’d stashed it between the mattress and the box spring. The book would not be in bookstores, would not be read, until winter, months away. Back at the factory, the page had gotten caught and torn and mangled in the feed. All the ink smeared. They could barely read any of the words, and the words they could read didn’t make any sense because they all just bled into a molasses of black. At the factory, Daisy had stuck the folded paper into the front of her jeans, against the skin of her stomach, where she wouldn’t get pawed and patted by security. Daisy and Elvis studied the paper marked with letters stretched and colliding, words running on top of each other, tangling, losing shape and meaning.

  · 8 ·

  A LITTLE FAMILY TREE:

  My grandson, Doc, lived with his niece, Tiff (short for Tiffany), in a little house across the street from me, a house they’d named the Artichoke Heart, for its green shingles. Doc’s sister, Tiff’s mother, had abandoned Tiff and fled to Paris six years before. It hadn’t surprised any of us when Ivy had just up and left; what had surprised us was that she’d been so devoted to Tiff for the first seven years of the girl’s life. Ivy had not been a junkie or a drunk—she’d been too uncommitted to anything to be an addict of any kind.

  There’s a pioneer graveyard out in the country, one you have to know about to find, as it’s tucked far back off the road and hidden by the drape of overgrown weeping willows. On the afternoon of Lenore’s disappearance, before we knew of all that was to possess us, Tiff and I went to the graveyard. I let Tiff drive once we turned off the paved roads. She had to stretch her leg and tippy her toes to press at the gas. She drove slowly, unbearably slowly, but when I snapped at her to speed up, she snapped back. “Please, Essie!” she said. “You make me too damn nervous!” But it was endless, her driving.

  Tiff and I stopped at the railroad tracks to pick wildflowers from the ditch to take to the cemetery to decorate the graves. A century of rain had worn away many of the names on the limestone, but dates remained, and Tiff held paper against the stone and ran a piece of charcoal over it to make rubbings of the most tragic dates—six days; eight days; two months. She made rubbings of carvings of babies with wings and of children riding on the backs of lithe dogs. She took pictures with a semi-expensive digital camera Doc had given her to encourage ambitions in journalism.

  As she snapped photos of an angel with no dots in her marble eyes, I sat on a stone bench, my back against a wrought-iron gate. A plump bumblebee bounced off my sleeve. “Bee!” I said, waving it away, and Tiff turned her camera on me. Tiff then showed me, in the little window in the back of her camera, the sight of me flustered, my eyes buggy, the bee nowhere.

  “What if the bee had stung me,” I said, “and it had turned out I’m fatally allergic? Having made it through my entire life, allergic to stings but never stung—would that seem like luck, even as I died?”

  “I don’t know,” Tiff said, “but I basically would’ve captured your murder on camera.” She raised one eyebrow and rocked on the balls of her feet. “Would I have clicked delete, or would I have kept it and looked at it over and over and over for the rest of my life?”

  “And would you have told anyone that you’d taken such a picture,” I said, “or would you have felt somehow responsible?”

  “You know, the thing is, I think I would’ve kept the picture,” she said, squinting, thinking. “But I don’t think I would’ve ever been able to look at it. It would’ve just always been there, and I’d always just kind of see it in my head. I would always want to look at it, like, I’d always be tempted to freak myself out with it, but I never would except, you know, once or twice maybe.”

  “And you would’ve always felt guilty thinking how if you’d just shooed the bee away instead of stopping to immortalize my fatal battle with it …”

  “Ack,” she said, “now I’m getting the creeps. Deleeeete.” And she erased the picture cleanly with a press of her thumb. I then posed for a proper photo after punching up the purplish-red of my lips with a few fresh dots of lipstick.

  She turned her camera around for me to see my picture, and I couldn’t quite take my eyes off myself, but not out of vanity, I don’t think. And I don’t think it was just because I’m so enamored of my great-granddaughter. You go through life exposed to so many snapshots of yourself looking half undone that when you see one that’s flattering—your hair just as you’d combed it, your blouse fitting how you’d hoped for it to fit—it’s like you’ve witnessed something long unknown about yourself. I was tempted to think I’d been pretty all along.

  Back at home, we investigated each other for ticks, the tall grass of the cemetery always so thick with them. As we sat on the sofa in our silk kimonos, we found two of the parasites with their fangs already sunk in.

  That summer of Lenore, Tiff was burned dark from the sun, and the tiny hairs on her leg were so blond they were nearly clear. Tiff could lose herself in my skin too, preoccupied by my arms and hands, by the wrinkles and spots and a stray hag-like hair curling up from a knuckle. She pushed, with her fingertips, at the flesh of my wrist, the skin slippery on the bone.

  · 9 ·

  Doc and his sister, Ivy, had been very close growing up. The two had not been tragically orphaned—they’d both been in their twenties when their parents’ car had slid off a tall, wet bridge. But Doc inherited the County Paragraph much too young, and it all possessed an urgency that distracted him. He took to wearing a linen suit and straw porkpie hat, elements of style that, in my honest opinion, hurt him in the community. Such dandification was why our readers preferred not to take him seriously. They’d loved his father’s editorials, his gentle turns of phrase and patriarchal commonsense. His father had been practiced in his plainspokenness. And though the neckties Doc wore to work were from his father’s collection of garish, handpainted ties bought on vacations (leggy Vegas showgirls in midkick, hula dancers with hibiscus bras) that had endeared Doc’s father to everyone and rendered him approachable and unpretentious—on Doc they looked affected.

  Ivy, meanwhile, fell into despair, feeling bereft not just of her parents but of Doc, now so newly responsible. Doc was fascinated by his sister, and he’d always been a willing audience for her every mad turn and dizzy spell. I’d long felt that Ivy’s incapacity for everyday life was put on for Doc’s benefit. She was mesmerized by his sympathy.

  Ivy mourned her parents by falling in love, dangerously so, with a man beautiful but demented, and she then became pregnant. Tiff doesn’t now even have a photo of her father because Ivy burned any pictures to an ash that she then spread ceremoniously across the dirt of the teacup roses she’d planted in memory of her mother.

  In Ivy’s sudden absence, seven-year-old Tiff showed all the classic signs of abandonment—bed-wetting, sleepwalking, heartbreaking crying jags. But Doc, in my very biased opinion, quickly took her mother’s place. Ivy never called, never remembered a birthday. Once a postcard from Avignon arrived with a melodramatically illegible scrawl—“Tiff, Please never forget me,” she’d written, so clearly engrossed in her own fiction of herself. I wanted to write back to her to tell her we’d all laughed. We hadn’t laughed, though. We’d wandered around in a funk for days, saddened that we’d had to be reminded of her and her indifference.

  Doc and Tiff established their own traditions, and even now they still sit in the yard on Sundays, in sunglasses, on a blanket,
reading aloud to each other, intensely, from books of instruction for magicians. Through catalogs, online sites, and road trips to estate auctions, they amassed closets full of tricks and a basement of magic cabinets. They had capes with hidden pockets and a magician’s assistant’s skimpy, feathery getup, its pink plumage mangy, having been nibbled away to sticks by dust mites. They stalked the yard’s doves and rabbits in order to test their false-bottomed birdcages and collapsible top hats. They played poker with decks with five aces, lit firecrackers to produce silk carnations with an innocuous pop. They plucked coins from each other’s nostrils, rubber mice from their ears, and miles of knotted-up scarves from their comically gaping mouths.

  It had been Doc’s dream, since his childhood, to open a magic shop. As a boy, he’d had no interest in working for the newspaper; rather, he’d pictured himself in a city of theaters. Whenever an illusionist needed a new fake thumb for his finger hatchet or a mirrored box for the segmenting of his assistant, Doc would be the supplier in this dream city of his. He’d have insights into all the sturdiest accoutrements of professional trickery, but he’d also serve the novice, the hobbyist, by offering the most convincing spyglasses, the foulest pepper gum.

  In Tiff he’d found a worthy acolyte. She was fellow magician, assistant, and randomly selected audience member, all in one. By the time her mother returned from France, Tiff had mastered skills of invisibility. Tiff could still herself with an eerie precision, softening her heartbeats and stopping her breath. She’d go fetal in order to curl herself into the narrowest nook or cranny.

  It was the summer Lenore went missing that our Ivy returned. With inheritance and insurance money that she’d miraculously avoided squandering, Ivy bought a house a few blocks from our houses. She painted it pink, as Tiff had requested, though Tiff had been mostly joking when she’d suggested it. At the café, where we would go for roast-beef sandwiches and cups of strong coffee, Ivy would order in French, then giggle before correcting herself.

  “You can move back in with me whenever you’re ready,” she told Tiff the day she arrived with gifts of new dresses, much too small, which Tiff dutifully modeled, leaving the buttons undone up the back or shrugging her shoulders to give her arms the appearance of not being too long for the sleeves.

  Ivy fashioned a bedroom for Tiff, gluing glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling and painting clouds on the walls, all in her approximation of what she thought a girl like Tiff might like. “I’ll let you know the second it’s ready,” she told Tiff, and we waited, curious about ourselves, wondering what we’d all do once the room was finished.

  · 10 ·

  Tiff stopped eating then, and none of us noticed. We spent the summer, as usual, devoted to gluttony, grilling steaks and pillaging our vegetable gardens—frying green beans in bacon and grease, roasting sweet corn. I sliced cucumbers and onions and let them soak in sugar and vinegar, and Ivy used fresh beet juice to bloody the red velvet cakes she baked.

  Then, into this summer idyll, the lifeguard of the swimming pool, a spunky, slight teenaged girl probably no stranger to anorexia herself, stopped by Doc’s to ask him if he’d noticed how sharp Tiff’s shoulder blades were looking lately, and how knobby her knees.

  “I eat!” Tiff shouted, protesting beyond all reason when we confronted her at dinner. “I eat like a pig!” She oinked noisily, puffing out her cheeks, a childishness that was unlike her. As we looked at her then, we saw what we hadn’t been seeing—our girl turning skeletal. We’d been so distracted by our own obsessing over what was best for Tiff that we’d let her drop from our sights. Whenever Ivy had been at the table with us, which had been often that summer, we’d been embarrassed by her clumsy, coquettish pursuit of her daughter’s affections, and we’d looked everywhere but at each other, tracing our fingers over the monograms stitched into our napkins or watching the funhouse stretch of our reflections in the bowls of our spoons.

  The night we accused her of starving herself, I asked her if she’d walk me to my door across the street. I linked my arm with hers, but she snatched hers back when she sensed me weighing the extent of her scrawniness, my fingertips considering the bone of her elbow.

  “My sister, Lydia, quit eating one summer,” I recalled. “She insisted only on watermelon so she could pee it all away.” I hadn’t thought about it in years. Lydia had been a teenager, and though there’d been only five years’ difference between us, she’d seemed, in her distance and mystery, far more sophisticated than I’d sensed I’d ever be. The starvation had lent Lydia even more gravity and refinement, despite how peaked and sunken-cheeked she’d grown by August. “The only reason my father worried was because he thought no one would marry her because ‘Who wants to marry a girl who looks like an old lady already?’ Back then, nobody thought a girl like that might need some help. We just thought she was being stubborn. Nobody knew what anorexia was, or anything like that.”

  Tiff stopped in the middle of the street, closed her eyes tight, and grabbed her head. “Oh. My. Gawwwwww-duh,” she wailed. “I am not anorexic.”

  “No, no, no, I know, I know you’re not, sweetie,” I said, but I swiftly ended with my denial, uncertain whether I might be making matters worse. You can always make matters worse these days, no matter where your heart is. When I was a young parent, we never used the word parenting. The only bad parents were parents with bad children. Now a parent can be doing the wrong thing even when she’s doing the right thing. We’ve all come to know too well the psychology of childhood.

  “I just get a stomachache sometimes,” she said. She sighed. “A firefly,” she said then, reaching up with her fingertip as if she might be able to tap its light back on.

  “They’re as thick as mosquitoes this summer,” I said, and certainly, there they all were as we looked up and down the street, the insects’ slow, delicate sparks giving the evening its character. “I’m a terrible cook,” I said. “It’s as simple as that. That’s why you can’t eat. You’re being poisoned. Who could blame you?” Tiff rolled her eyes, and she took my arm and led me from the street and up my front walk. “Lydia could cook,” I said. “She even cooked for my daddy and me during her hunger strike. That summer that she was starving herself, she stuffed us to the gills. To distract us, maybe. I think we were half asleep half the time, we ate so much and so often. Oh, how Lydia could cook before she got old. If she could still cook, you’d eat. You’d gorge yourself.”

  “You wouldn’t worry I was too thin; you’d worry I was too fat,” she said.

  “I’d worry you were too fat, yes, probably,” I said, and as I touched again at her arm and felt her lean against me, I wondered if it were too wistful and naive to hope that Tiff might make it through life neither too fat nor too thin and perhaps entirely undamaged in general.

  Part

  THREE

  · 11 ·

  The farm on which the girl Lenore was said to have lived was a patchwork of agricultural projects: minor orchards and mostly fruitless gardens. A forest of evergreens, intended for Christmas, trudged up one side of a low hill and down the other, each tree long since too big for any house. Daisy’s father had planted them, and he’d died before they’d grown. The trees’ branches stretched up and out, the air around them thick with the medicinal gin-scent of juniper. Back when the evergreens had been right-sized for a holiday, no families in parkas had come with their little axes, so the trees, unsold, continued to grow and grow, overgrowing any potential, darkening the paths of dry needles beneath them.

  And along a trellis, a vineyard had perished, the plants choked one summer by the herbicides carried over on the wind from a neighboring farm. Now all that remained were the knobby sticks of dried vines.

  A narrow plank that hung from a few thin chains at the farm’s entrance bore the name of the farm—the Crippled Eighty—which had been burned into the wood, in that shivery, lasso-like, cowboy cursive, with a wood-burning kit by Daisy’s father. But the farm had actually been named, in mockery, by Daisy’s mother, long
before Lenore was even born (if, indeed, she’d been born at all). “Nothing will grow,” the woman had told her husband. “It’s eighty acres of hills,” she’d said. She hadn’t even looked at the landscape as she’d stood in the sun, squinting instead at her reflection in a small mirror, the glass of it dusted with aspirin that had broken at the bottom of her pocketbook. She’d dabbed on lipstick as she’d spoken. “You bought the only acreage within miles that doesn’t have an inch of flatness. What are you going to do? Grow olive trees?”

  But the land, uncrippled after all, had come to life for Daisy’s father, and for thirty years there’d been a lush harvest of corn one summer, beans the next, then corn again; there’d been cattle, hogs, chickens, eggs, milk. There’d been pasture choked with musk thistle and a narrow creek that had always made Daisy think of the baby Moses shoved off in a thatched basket. At least that was how things had been before Daisy’s mother had left the farm.

  Daisy, a woman none of us had known at all well, told all this to Doc. She trusted Doc to tell her story. From the very beginning, she confided in him, and as Doc featured her on his front page week after week, and as the newspaper gained new subscribers not just from the region but from far beyond, far even outside the United States, his was the voice most closely associated with the facts and fictions of Lenore’s disappearance. While other writers from other towns approached the subject with big-city insensitivity, their every word a coy wink, Doc lent Lenore a beating heart.

  Lenore’s absence only days old, Daisy took Doc on a tour of the farm. Here, she told him, was a stump where Lenore sat and startled spiders and let them bite her so she could watch the effect of their venom; here was Lenore’s own patch of garden, where she tried to grow things no one else in the local countryside grew, from seeds sent in the mail and fertilized with bat guano: tomatillos as hard and bitter as green apples; a Mexican melon with thorns on its skin. Tiny, foreign tomatoes, still plentiful on the vine that July afternoon, tasted like mango.