The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters Read online

  “That’s it,” their mother said matter-of-factly as Lily coughed. She licked her thumb and wiped the blood from Lily’s cheek.

  “Is she all right?” Mabel said, but she was already so relieved. She was relieved that Lily no longer choked and that it was her mother who saved her. Her mother’s cheeks had color, and she stood up straight and ran her fingers through Lily’s hair, scowling at the terrible rat’s nest it had become.

  “When was the last time you had a bath?” she said, kneeling to take Lily into her arms, pressing her lips against her forehead. “You’re all right,” she told her, sounding convincing for the first time in weeks. “You’re lucky. People choke on things all the time. I should know, I used to be a waitress.”

  “She choked on the little Swiss girl from the clock,” Mabel said, gently pinching Lily’s shoulder as apology for hitting her. “I wonder where it went?”

  “We need to find it,” their mother said, jumping up and setting Lily on her feet. “We need to put it back on the clock before your grandmother gets back. You girls have to stop running roughshod over this place.”

  Punish us, Mabel thought. Spank us. Correct us. As the three of them moved about the shop, they picked things up and put things back and quickly became distracted from their mission. Lily tried on an old felt hat and pulled the lace of it down over her face. Mabel’s mother sorted through a box of reading spectacles, testing different pairs by holding them before her eyes and reading from a framed list of hotel laws. Mabel opened the drawer of an apothecary and took from it a cornshuck doll, its skirt half eaten by mites. Mabel then sat on the floor next to a chest full of single, unmatched shoes, and she tried each one on. Lily pressed the dents from the plastic head of a doll.

  They lifted things, examined them, then put them in the wrong places; they scooted aside tables and chairs to make paths for themselves; they picked up boxes to look in the boxes beneath them. The shop, a secondhand shop where nothing ever changed hands, where the prices had all faded from the tags, possessed an order and permanence Mabel relied upon. It was as if the layers of dust and webs that covered everything anchored everything to the floor. Mabel had even hidden things of her own in the shop—there was a letter, from her Aunt Phyll, folded up and tucked behind a hat band; inside a toaster was a honeymoon photo of her mother and father in front of Mount Rushmore. Mabel even kept the pieces of a busted record, a recording, made in a booth at the state fair, of her father singing an old song—“Chuck E.’s in Love.” Mabel had hidden the pieces inside a long, white glove inside a long, yellow box.

  Lily’s act of theft, Mabel thought, her taking the little wooden girl, had changed something in the house, had changed the gravity in the room, lifting their mother from her bed. Mabel looked to the ceiling, worried about the chairs and rolls of carpet tied to the rafters with frayed rope and knots that hadn’t been tightened in years.

  They all quickly bored of their search and collapsed into a dusty sofa. Mabel rested her head in her mother’s lap; Lily lay against her shoulder. Mabel felt so at ease. For weeks, she had been too worried about them all to feel at all safe. She feared that, with her mother shut up in her room, her grandmother off robbing old farms and churches, that someone would sneak in to steal Lily away, to molest her; they wouldn’t take Mabel because she was too thin and prickly, but Lily they would find adorable. Someday, Lily would be found in the city, feral and dirty and mute. Mabel would be brought in to coax her from her silence. She would dress up in a gray wool skirt and a white blouse with a bit of lace at the tips of the collar. She’d ask private questions only a sister could ask. She’d ask Lily in a quiet voice, “Where did they touch you?” She’d ask, “What did they make you touch?”

  Lily took the plastic cork from a small vial and sprinkled some perfume on her wrist. She ran her wrist along her neck and chest. She then held the vial before her eyes to try to read the faint lettering, but even with her glasses so thick, she seemed unable to make it out. “Wild Skin,” Lily pretended to read, though Mabel could see that it said only “Do not drink.”

  Mabel, so exhausted she drifted into a minute’s sleep, saw her father’s eyes as pale green as Coke bottle glass, and his open mouth, and she heard the gun knock against his teeth. She woke with a gasp, and her mother said, “Shhhh,” and smoothed back Mabel’s hair. Mabel wondered if her father killed himself because her mother refused to ever see him again. He probably loved her so much.

  Lily held her hand to her throat and sighed, affecting their mother’s posture of grief. “My nerves are shot,” she muttered.

  They heard the rumble of an old car pass on the road alongside the shop, and they all rushed to the window to look out. An apricot-colored Toronado glistened like jam in a pot. Crammed into the car were the women, the birdwatchers Mabel had seen walking through the Riordan house. A ways down the first mile, the car slowed. Mabel took the opera glasses from her pocket and she could see the women spill from the car to investigate; Mabel held one hand over her heart beating hard as the women picked up the bloody feathers from the ground. Her mother held tightly to Mabel’s hand, and Lily pressed her hand against the glass of the window. Each birdwatcher headed off in a different direction, slowly searching a different parcel of land. Worse than them finding the bird dead, Mabel thought, would be them finding it alive. Then they’d all know that someone had left it there alone to suffer unrepaired.

  5.

  ON THE NIGHT OF HER BIRTHDAY, after leaving Lily’s school-bus apartment, Mabel got in the Jimmy and drove away. She recognized every field and fence post her headlights swept across. Some people thought of it all as open spaces of nothing, and that’s what made the land feel close to Mabel’s heart. She knew the rhythms of the rattling planks as she drove across old wood bridges, and she knew which roads were heavily rutted from heavy farm machinery. She knew which corners hid dangerous blind spots and which railroad tracks had no red lights of warning. She knew intimately a nearly private part of the world. There was a kind of privilege in that, Mabel decided.

  Mabel drove to the Platte River, to where her father liked to take them all for a swim beneath the bridge. After they’d given up on chasing the bull the night of her eighth birthday, after the bull had run across the graveyard and into the dark behind the white church, escaping entirely, they’d gone to the river. Mabel’s father parked at the edge of the bridge and they all stumbled out of the pickup. He flipped forward the seat and took a flashlight from a toolbox and two warm beers from a paper sack. He gave a beer to Mabel’s mother, who held Lily asleep in her arms, then took Mabel by the hand.

  “Did I ever show you this?” he said, shining the light before them, leading her to a thick wooden post partly broken and slightly bent. He pressed her fingers to the break, to a spot of blue paint. “When your mom went into labor with you, I was out here getting drunk with the guys. Your grandpa came out to tell me, and I was so out of it and so excited that I got in my car and thought I was going in reverse, but I was going forward. I ran into this post and knocked my head against the steering wheel or something. Knocked myself out and cut myself up and made a wreck of my car. Ten stitches,” he said, shining the flashlight on the little scar on his forehead. He’d told her about it all before, but she liked hearing it again and touching his scar. She liked hearing about how her birth, a month too soon, disrupted everything. “When I came to, I just walked down the hall to the nursery to look in at you. You were all squinty and fuzzy and crabby in your crib. A fussy little mess. But who can blame you, you’d just been through a lot.”

  Mabel drove the Jimmy up to the post, still bent and broken. She got out and knelt beside the break and touched at the bit of blue paint that remained. Above the rush of the water over the sand, Mabel heard wind whistling through the holes in the bridge, and she thought of the blades of grass her father would pluck from the side of the river. He’d put the grass between his teeth for sharp, quick whistles that neither Mabel nor Lily could reproduce when he placed the grass on
their tongues.

  Mabel stood and leaned against the post and worried about her father on that day of her birth. He was drunk and clumsy and could have been hurt worse, leaving Mabel even sooner than he had, leaving her without Lily, even. But what business did he have having babies and leaving his friends on a warm summer day at the river? He was only a kid, still knocking himself around, getting stitches in his head. Mabel took off her shoes and stepped into the river water, and the feel of sand between her toes and the bite of a minnow at her ankle reminded her of how her father had dangled her over the side of the bridge when she was very small. He’d hold tight to her feet and dip her toward the river and she’d stretch to touch the water’s top. Feeling the wind, and the spin of the blood rushing to her head as the river flowed beneath her, Mabel felt that her only connection to earth was the little bit of pain from her father’s grip too tight. By the time she turned eight, she’d gotten too big, too heavy for her father’s bad shoulders ruined in high school football. She sometimes begged her father, and her mother would scold her for begging, and she’d end up wasting the afternoon pouting, wishing she was only five or six again.

  AS MABEL drove back home, she opened the glove compartment to look for a box of Hot Tamales left from the last time she went to the movies, and she saw a newspaper clipping she’d saved for Lily. One of the old farm women, who knew Mabel’s habit of collecting tragic stories, had given the clipping to her a few weeks before.

  Mabel read the article as she drove, holding it up to the dashboard light. A ten-year-old girl was taken to a therapist for something called rebirth therapy that involved wrapping the girl in blankets and pillows. The therapist twisted the girl up in the blanket to represent the womb and pressed on the pillows to simulate labor contractions. The girl suffocated and died. Troubled, the article said about the girl. “The therapy is intended to enable troubled children to heal from past trauma.” Mabel was sick thinking about what miseries the poor little girl had endured, probably again and again, at the hands of irresponsible adults.

  Mabel drove the pickup right up to the side of the bus, leaving the headlights on. She stepped up into the bus and up to the mattress, where Lily, covering herself with a sheet, squinted and held her hand up to the light.

  “Lily,” Mabel said, pushing aside the mosquito netting and kneeling beside the bed. Jordan grumbled in his sleep and rolled over.

  “Sweetie,” Lily said, wiping some tears from Mabel’s cheeks with the palm of her hand. “Sweetheart.”

  “I have an idea. I just thought of it as I drove up, just now.” Mabel paused for effect, taking hold of Lily’s arm. She’d never been more serious about anything. “A foster child. We could take in a foster child. You know, some fucked-up little mess who nobody has ever loved. I mean, I just thought of it just now, but it’s so friggin’ perfect.” Mabel, distracted by her new idea, didn’t care what Lily did or where she went. Mabel wanted to go up to the house immediately and scrounge through the shop for children’s toys, for little dresses or pants. She wanted to get a room ready for her new, miserably sad son or daughter.

  “Jordan,” Lily said, shaking at him. “Go turn off those headlights.” Jordan crawled out of bed in his boxer shorts and sleepily kissed Mabel on the top of the head as he passed her. “Lie down here,” Lily said.

  “I can’t, Lily,” Mabel said. “There are things I want to do up at the house.”

  “They’re not going to let you have a kid,” Lily said. “You have to meet income requirements and stuff. You have to have stability. You’re too young. I mean, someday you’ll make a great foster parent, but now you just need to lie down. Come on, I’m tired.” The bus fell into darkness as Jordan put out the headlights. Mabel heard Lily making room for her on the mattress.

  “No,” Mabel said, “no, Lily, see, that’s where you’re wrong. There are more of these fucked-up kids than they know what to do with. And, see, I’ll take anybody in. It doesn’t have to be some cute little kid, I’ll take some bitchy fourteen-year-old drug addict. I’ve got a lot to offer somebody like that.” Mabel felt winded from her argument, but she kept with it, her voice weakening, her breathing hard. “I’m not too young. I had to grow up really fast.” But she knew she didn’t sound convincing.

  Jordan got back into bed on the other side of Lily, and Lily took Mabel’s arm, pulling her in. Mabel, too tired to object, and still in her shoes and her dress, lay beside Lily. She lay on her back, feeling Lily’s breath on her neck. “I went to the river,” Mabel said. “I heard Dad whistling. I really did.”

  “I’m too tired to play,” Lily said. “Go to sleep.” Though it was much too hot to be lying so close, Mabel drifted off at Lily’s command, the newspaper clipping still crumpled in her fist.

  6.

  AT CARUSO’S STEAK-AND-SPAGHETTI house on the square in Bonnevilla, Jordan strummed a guitar as part of a guitar trio that trolled about the tables for tips and song requests. Lily waitressed and ran the cigar counter, selling the Palmas and the Pencils and the Churchill Sweets.

  A long bench sat along one wall of the lobby of the steak-house, and the same handful of men gathered there nightly. They spent hours tossing cards into an overturned hat in some lazy game. As they talked, smoke lifted from their lips with every word or laugh or wheeze, and the minutes they burned from the ends of their lives clouded the lobby.

  Lily closed up the cigar counter and slapped her hands toward the old men on the bench, like shooing pigeons. When she turned her back on them, she felt somebody’s bony fingers brush across her ass, and a shudder of death worked through her. It outraged her that even one of them thought they could touch her with their rotten-corpse hands, and “Which one of you ratty fucking dogs . . .” was what she wanted to say, but her boss still sat at his corner desk counting his day’s dollars, smoking a long, fat Excalibur.

  Lily locked up the glass humidors on the counter and heard the clink and churn of the toy vending machine by the front door. “Anything good?” Lily asked Jordan. He examined the small plastic globe that fell from the chute and took from it a sheet of lick-on tattoos. He placed a picture of a hula girl on his tongue then lifted the sleeve of Lily’s dress and pressed the wet paper against the skin of her upper arm.

  Lily held her sleeve up and blew on the tattoo to dry it; she winked at Jordan, charmed by his gift of the hula girl. She gave Jordan a lot of grief a lot of the time, but he was irresistible, mostly, like his attraction to old comics bought from used bookstores. Though he read the Daredevil, and Ghost Rider, and Silver Surfer, it was his taste for Hot Stuff, and Baby Huey, and Little Lotta that attracted Lily. She had thought it adorable one day when she’d gone in for a pedicure and found Jordan sitting at his manicurist’s table sipping from a cup of Thera-Flu tea and reading Spooky, the Tuff Little Ghost.

  “A guy who was just in here said there’s an abandoned house burning to the ground in the country,” Jordan said. “Everybody’s driving out to watch it.”

  Lily followed Jordan out the alley door. Jordan looked handsome and reckless to Lily, his guitar strapped to his back, a few crazy notes plinking from the strings with his walking. The double breast of Jordan’s blue uniform was unbuttoned, and he held a bottle of something to his thin, naked chest. The uniform was from an old high school band, complete with braided epaulets; the restaurant owner had bought it at the hospital thrift.

  When they got in the Packard, Jordan held out the bottle, a raspberry-flavored schnapps. “Want a sip?”

  “Ick,” Lily said. “You’re a mess with all your sweet stuff. Rot your teeth and your gut.” When Lily first met Jordan, she thought him a cute ruin.

  “You’ve got some wrong ideas about me,” Jordan said.

  A portable tape deck sat on the floor of the Packard, and Lily turned it on. When she heard Chrissie Hynde singing, she took the tape from the deck and saw her father’s handwriting across the white label of the cassette. The tape was one of many Lily’s father had left behind. Lily thought it was sweet
that Jordan would have this with him, would play something like “Brass in Pocket” even when alone.

  Lily’s father had some musical talent, she remembered; he could play a song on the piano, just having heard it once. Often, when Lily heard a new song, she could hear an echo, a spirit accompaniment—a tinny rendering on an untuned piano. For six months, Lily’s father rented an upright painted over a hideous brownish green. When the music store called one rainy Saturday afternoon to say someone was coming by to repossess it, Lily’s father tossed together a block party in the apartment living room. Lily hadn’t been very old at the time, but she remembered it all, and the details of the party continued to break her heart. She remembered the neighbors’ umbrellas and galoshes in the hallway, and how, when she touched the apartment walls, she could feel them shivering with the laughs and chatter of all the guests crammed in the tiny room. Her father broke out bottles of Champale (A drink so fine, Eddy Rollow proclaimed with his trademark wink, it’s given to departing contestants on game shows) and he took requests. Even Lily’s mother, who’d been too depressed those days to leave the loveseat, asked Eddy to play a song from Yentl. She put on a gauzy yellow tea-length and a cloth rose in her hair, and she drank her Champale with tomato juice.

  Had Lily’s mother attempted suicide herself one late night? Lily wasn’t sure, but she thought she remembered lying in bed, hearing her mother coughing and retching and her father’s urgent tones muffled by the phone receiver. Had it been that same night that Mrs. Black from across the hall had come in to give Lily and Mabel baby aspirin and to read to them from Ramona the Pest until they fell asleep? Lily took a pen from her purse and wrote MOM—SUICIDE? on the palm of her hand. She was keeping a list of terribly sensitive questions she’d ask when she finally saw her mother again.