The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters Read online

  JORDAN, in a dark blue suit with baggy trousers, his hand-painted tie depicting long-legged women in polka-dot bathing suits, brought down a bucket of ice and a bottle of whiskey for the Manhattans. In his back pocket, he carried a bottle of apple cider. Jordan liked all the sweet drinks, all the coolers flavored like soda pop, and the ices with pieces of fruit. But Lily thought booze should taste like dirt and smoke and wood, and she preferred bourbon or a dark beer.

  “When ’arf of your bullets fly wide in the ditch,” Jordan quoted from somewhere, examining the portable martini glass, “don’t call your martini a cross-eyed old bitch.”

  Mabel carried the sweet vermouth. She looked pretty but too thin in a clingy dress that changed colors from blue to green to purple as she moved in the candlelight. When their mother abandoned them with their lazy grandmother, all the farmers’ wives and widows in the area left recipes to encourage their grandmother to cook, to fatten Mabel up. When looking at the yellowed recipe cards, Lily had dreamed of life in their warm little homes, of pictures of Jesus on the walls and the smell of cinnamon and clove in the kitchens.

  Mabel put the bottle on the table and opened her other hand to let five chokecherries roll out. A tree on the other side of a fence down the hill dropped the fruit onto their land every late summer. “I didn’t have any maraschinos,” Mabel said.

  Lily ate the sour chokecherry from around its tiny pit, and with the sharp taste she saw her father standing in the pasture, tearing his jeans on barbed wire, the muscles in his arms straining as he reached up to pull down a branch. Even with the branch bent, Lily still couldn’t reach the chokecherries, and he’d shake the branch, and she’d try to catch them as they rained in front of her. Because of the sandburs that stuck in Lily’s socks, her father would carry her back across the pasture. She’d lay her head on his shoulder and press her lips against his neck, touching her tongue to the salt of his sweat.

  “Do you think our mother knows?” Lily said, dropping a chokecherry into the Manhattan that Jordan shook together for her. “About why Daddy did it?” It was a question Lily and Mabel had passed back and forth between each other for years, a question worked smooth like sea glass.

  Mom must know something was Mabel’s usual answer, but tonight she simply said, “No.” Mabel took a ribbon of frosting from the cake and ate it, then sipped her Manhattan, cringing from the bite of the whiskey. “What could she know, really?”

  “Seems to me,” Lily said, “she’d have some thoughts.”

  “He had children too young,” Mabel said. “Married too young. He was as young as you are now.”

  “This isn’t so young,” Lily said, though she couldn’t imagine having a baby to look after. She could still remember taking baths in the kitchen sink, her mother washing her hair with a bar of soap. Her own childhood was still fresh in her mind. “How old were you that one birthday?”

  “Eight,” Mabel said, knowing exactly what Lily was talking about.

  “You ever hear about Mabel’s eighth birthday?” Lily asked Jordan, and though he nodded, Lily talked about it anyway. Lily put her bare feet up onto Jordan’s knees, and crossed her ankles. “Grandpa had died not too long before, but Grandma still had a bull in the pasture. Daddy had helped her sell it, so he put it into the back of the pickup, and me and Mabel and Mom all crammed into the front with Dad to take it to some farm down the road.”

  “There were tall railings up the sides of the truck,” Mabel said, “and the bull broke through them and ran away.” They followed the bull as it ran into town trampling through somebody’s backyard tomato plants, disrupting a picnic in a park, tearing down Chinese lanterns and a badminton net. Mabel always denied it, but she had cried as the night dragged on, the bull ruining her birthday. But Lily had loved watching something from her tiny life shake awake the whole sleepy town.

  “I forget how you caught him,” Jordan said.

  “We forget too,” Lily said. “We think we may have lost him somewhere.” It tired her to fill in all the details. She liked how she could just merely suggest something to Mabel, and she could watch the recognition in her face. There hadn’t been much of anything that they hadn’t seen together.

  Lily reached over and tugged a bit on the sleeve of Jordan’s suit coat, covering his wrist. She’d have to do something about that scar if she was going to show him off to her mother. “I need to find that last letter Mom wrote to us,” Lily said.

  Mabel just looked at Lily over the top of the Manhattan she only barely sipped. “Why?” she finally said.

  “I need the return address.” Lily was tempted to invite Mabel along on her journey, but she knew better. Mabel, her mother, everyone, needed to understand that Lily needed no mothering. They would all see that, in spite of everything, Lily had turned out a good, capable person.

  “I was just reading in the paper,” Mabel said, “of a woman in Mexico bitten by a brown recluse spider. They had to cut off her arms and her legs and part of her nose.”

  Lily straightened up in her chair, ready to tell Mabel of her plans. “Mabel . . .” she started, pushing her glasses down on her nose so that everything blurred. She nervously pulled at a loose string at the hem of her dress. “Mabel.”

  “I already know that you’re going to see her,” Mabel said. “If that’s what you’re about to tell me. Jordan told me already. About the two of you going to find Mom.”

  Lily pushed her glasses back up to see Mabel scowling and concentrating on picking her chokecherry from where it had sunk to the bottom of her Manhattan. Lily looked over at Jordan who couldn’t even meet her eyes; he fussed with the end of his necktie. The cool demeanor Lily had practiced all afternoon turned into a migraine headache and tiny bolts of colored light in the corners of her vision. Was everything intimate just gossip to him? He wanted Mabel’s attention too much of the time, and it was beginning to make Lily too sick of it all. “Fuck you,” Lily said, lifting her feet to kick Jordan’s knee. “I could fucking beat the crap out of you,” giving him a whack at the side of his head with her open palm.

  “Could you not,” Jordan said, drowsy-sounding, cringing, “not, you know, slug me?”

  “Jordan,” Mabel said. “Maybe you should leave us alone for a few minutes.”

  “Fuck off, Mabel,” Lily said. “He’s my boyfriend, I’ll tell him when he stays and when he goes, all right?”

  Jordan started, “I should just tell you . . .”

  “Oh, just get the fuck out of here, Jordan,” Lily said. “I mean, I have so fucking had it with you right now.” She immediately regretted having said it, and she stumbled over the last few words of her outburst. Tranquility, Lily thought, hearing the useless recitation she had found in some self-help paperback someone had left behind in the bakery. Peacefulness. Serenity.

  As Jordan stood, shaky as if on new legs, Lily wanted to grab the lapel of his pathetic suit and demand that he ignore her and her fits.

  “If you’ll excuse me, Birthday Girl,” Jordan said, brushing his fingers against the cheek of the always-quiet, always-collected Mabel. The whole bus creaked as Jordan headed toward the door, the slow tap of the high heels of his fake-alligator cowboy boots echoing. Lily lowered her head, again disgusted by her own tears, which always welled up when she most wanted composure. She lifted her glasses from her cheeks to wipe at her eyes.

  “Lily,” Mabel said softly, reaching across the table to touch at her elbow. Lily wished she didn’t always bring out the sugary sweet pushiness in her sister. Lily had planned for it to be the other way around that night, for Mabel to be angry over Lily’s decision to go find their ungrateful mother and for Lily to remain distant and consoling. Mabel, Lily would have said, gently taking her hand.

  Lily thought of again reminding Mabel of that day their mother left them. Mabel had screamed and bawled, stumbling along the front walk of the antique shop, grasping at her mother’s quick scissor-stepping legs. “Don’t,” their mother said, pushing at Mabel’s head. Mabel grabbed the back
strap of her mother’s sandal, and she slapped Mabel’s hand away. “Goddamn it, don’t. I’m going to trip.”

  Lily had stayed on the front porch, not fully understanding. Her mother had not announced her departure, had only suddenly appeared in makeup and brushed hair, freshly ironed skirt and blouse, a small suitcase packed. As her mother rushed through the shop, her eyes to the ground, Lily sneezed from the breeze of heavy perfume. Mabel looked up from her comic book.

  Mabel had known right away and had fallen suddenly into a fierce fit of crying. When their mother finally reached her car, she tossed her suitcase into the backseat, and Mabel reached in and tried to grab it back out. Their mother wrestled it from Mabel and tossed it back in. Mabel tried to get it back, but their mother held on to Mabel’s sleeve in order to close the door.

  “Give me a break, Mabel,” her mother shouted at her. When the door slammed was when everything stopped. Mabel’s screaming stopped; their mother’s leaving stopped. They both stood still there next to the car, looking at each other with fear. Lily hadn’t realized it just then, but the tip of Mabel’s finger had caught in the door, and she’d pulled it out to hold her hand shaking before her. Her mouth was open wide, her jaw shivering, readying for the worst shriek of pain Lily would ever hear.

  Though their mother lifted Mabel into her arms and seated the violently kicking girl in the front seat of the car, though she sped her to the emergency room for a few minutes of wrapping and splinting then brought her back to the shop to put her to bed and to lie beside her, nothing had changed her intentions. She slipped away for good after Mabel cried herself to sleep.

  “You’ve been a mess yourself from time to time,” Lily said, leaning back from the table. She took the lacy handkerchief that Mabel offered. Lily dried her cheeks, then held the hanky in her lap, running her finger along the cursive of the name of its original owner, “Penelope,” embroidered at the edge.

  “Lily,” Mabel said, “why do you even want to see her? She doesn’t care about us. She hasn’t even called us in years. Did she even send me a birthday card? Does she even remember that it’s my birthday?”

  “So you mean to tell me,” Lily said, “that you don’t have the least bit of interest in seeing her again? Ever? There’s nothing you want to know about her? Nothing you want to ask her?”

  Mabel picked off a little corner of the birthday cake and ate it. “You’re not going to learn anything. She’s not going to tell you anything useful.”

  Lily tore off a bit of cake for herself. “You don’t have to hate her so much. Our lives aren’t ruined or anything. There’s nothing wrong with us.”

  “There’s nothing wrong, I know,” Mabel repeated, almost beneath her breath.

  “I think she meant to come back, don’t you?” Lily didn’t wait to let Mabel disagree. “I just think time may have passed differently for her. What seemed like forever to us, probably went very quickly for her. And, you know,” Lily said, tearing off another edge of the cake, excited to be at her mother’s defense, “it could be that she’s been waiting for us to come find her.”

  “What the fuck were we supposed to do?” Mabel said, raising her voice. “Crawl across the desert with our little plastic suitcases? With our grade-school watercolors . . . or our, you know, our fucking macaroni pictures for her to put on her fucking refrigerator? We were babies.”

  Lily was so relieved to hear Mabel’s voice shake, to hear her sigh and cuss and to see her twisting her hair. Lily cocked her head with Mabel’s gesture of concern and reached across the table to touch at her elbow.

  “Shouldn’t I at least go with you?” Mabel said, but she didn’t wait for Lily to reject the offer. “Shouldn’t we at least call her first?”

  “We don’t have her phone number.”

  “We could find it,” Mabel said, “or we could send a telegram. But you don’t want to do that, do you? You don’t want to give her any warning.”

  Lily felt sorry for Mabel when she thought of her sitting alone in the house waiting for Jordan and Lily to come back. Mabel didn’t really have any friends, and she’d never had a good boyfriend. “Just let me do this, Mabel,” Lily nearly whispered. She took Mabel’s hand to scratch affectionately at the chipped green polish of her fingernails. “I’m only going for a few days. I just want to introduce her to Jordan. Just take a walk with her. I just want to know her a little bit. I just want to get to know her.”

  Mabel pulled her hand away and stood from the table, brushing cake crumbs from the front of her dress. Silent, she walked toward the door of the bus. “Mabel,” Lily said. “Mabel, don’t be like that.” Lily didn’t go after her because she knew Mabel only ever needed a little bit of time. Mabel didn’t like to cause worry for anything more than an hour or two. But when Lily saw that the Joan Armatrading album lay, still wrapped, beside the cake, she felt miserable for always disappointing poor Mabel. Lily tore off the tissue paper; she’d wrap it again later. She felt like hearing “Cool Blue Stole My Heart,” so she unplugged the Christmas lights from the extension cord and plugged in the portable record player. In the near dark, she squinted at the turning record, looking for the right groove that started the song. As she set the needle down with a thump, Lily heard tiny stones tossed against the glass of the bus windows.

  “Are you through being an asshole?” Jordan said, when Lily came to the window. Lily nodded, as pleased as always with Jordan’s ease. She reached out the window for his cigarette, and he handed it up to her. She took a puff and handed it back. “Is Mabel mad?” he said.

  “Yes,” Lily said. “I want to go soon, Jordan.” But she didn’t trust that Starkweather’s Packard would make it anywhere near Mexico.

  Jordan reached up again and took Lily’s hand. “We’ll get the Packard tuned up,” Jordan said, “then I’ll take you to see your mother.” Lily closed her eyes, liking the sound of that. Jordan, though skinny and wounded, could look after her very well if he set his mind to it. Feeling a buzz from the Manhattan and from the sugar of the cake, Lily was ready to believe in whatever Jordan told her.

  “Come inside,” Lily said.

  Jordan returned to Lily’s side at the table, and they ate some more cake with their fingers, ignoring the plastic forks and paper plates. “I ruined Mabel’s birthday,” Lily said.

  “She’ll be lonely when we’re gone,” Jordan said.

  “Mabel will be fine,” Lily said, and she really believed it. It would be best for the both of them to have some time apart. “We’ve always been fine. We’ve been lucky, really. We’ve always had a roof over our head.” Jordan glanced up to the ceiling of the school bus with a skeptical half grin. “You know what I mean,” Lily said.

  Jordan leaned toward Lily to lick the frosting from the edge of her lips, then went back to sit on the bed to pull off his boots. Still at the table, her back to Jordan, Lily decided to finally ask him some questions she’d been avoiding. The questions, the most obvious ones, seemed like things she should have asked months before, on the third or fourth date or something. But it had been much easier not to, to let his steps toward suicide remain nothing more serious than a vague mystery.

  “Did you hope to die that day?” Lily said, just said it, sitting in the dark not looking at him. “When you cut your wrist?” He didn’t say anything for a moment, and Lily wondered if he was looking down at his scar, touching at it gently with his fingertip, tapping at it, uncertain it was his.

  “Did I hope to die? Did I hope?” He said it snide, like it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. “No. No, I didn’t hope to die. No. Fuck no.” When Lily didn’t say anything, Jordan continued, less peevish. “I was really young,” he said, though the slashing of his wrist had only been a year or so before. “Everything seemed like a little more trouble than it was worth.”

  “You loved that girl,” Lily said. “Kate.” Lily wasn’t bothered by Kate or by the creased picture of her he still kept tucked in a pocket of his wallet. In the photo, Kate sat in a bay window in an out
dated white dress that had to have been hand-me-down. The black braid of her hair lay across her shoulder, and her silver heart-shaped locket was open at her throat. Lily had never met Kate, but she respected her as part of Jordan’s heartbreak, part of why he was the way he was.

  “When she said it was over,” Jordan said, “I thought about dying and thought about how if I died, I’d at least be something important in her life. It would change her forever, wouldn’t it? It got so I liked thinking of myself as a pretty girl’s dead boyfriend. I figured I’d be some ghost, and I’d watch her grow old and sad. I’d see her never quite getting over it all.” Jordan sighed, then began tapping his fingers to the song on the record. “But hell, yeah, I’m glad I didn’t die. She was kind of a toothy girl, really, and, you know, she didn’t really dance as well as she thought she did.”

  Lily imagined telling her mother exactly what Jordan had said about not wanting to die, as they had one of those long breakfasts that last past lunch, as they talked about their days apart.

  She went to sit beside Jordan on the bed. She pictured him wet and sleepy in the tub, his arm flung out in tragic gesture, his cheeks tear-streaked. A beautiful waste, Lily thought, feeling dramatic imagining his blood drip drip dripping into a puddle on the peeling linoleum floor. A wasteful beauty.

  Lily took Jordan’s hand and touched at the scar, and she knew that it was a bright pink declaration of life, no matter what he said about death and becoming a ghost—he’d cut only one wrist just minutes before his mother was expected home from work. Not only did Jordan not want to die, Lily realized, but he wanted to be begged to live.