Bone and Bread (10 page)

Deana thought we should cry as much as we wanted, and she cried right along with us, at the table, on the couch, in Mama's room in the middle of the night. When Sadhana or I was racked by sobs, nose streaming, Deanna would weep silently, one arm around my shoulders, or one hand rubbing the back of Sadhana's head. Sadhana and I never cried at the same time anymore, except at night.

One night I woke in the dark from a dream about our parents, both of them alive together as I had never known them, except when I was very small and almost too young to remember. I barely breathed, trying to keep still and cling to the strange elation as it faded. I heard Sadhana cough and then sniff twice, and as I came back to an awareness of my body, I could tell without opening my eyes that we were alone in the room. Something about the weight of the bed I was lying on. Deana must have needed to drive home for something.

Sadhana said, “Bee? Are you awake?”

“I was just dreaming.”

“I don't know what we're going to do.” She sounded choked. “What's going to happen to us?”

“It was the most beautiful dream, Sadhana. Mama was there, and Papa, too. They were fine. We were going to a park, I think. I don't know. We were all talking. They were happy.” Mama in her green pioneer dress with the high collar and Papa in his wedding garb, the embroidered white
sherwani
of the photo on Mama's dresser — and wearing a bowler hat. I wondered where my mind had picked that one up. Even as the glow of the dream faded, I felt as though I'd been given a message, or at least a bubble of peace we could enjoy until the air ran out.

There was a pause, and then my sister in a hoarseness, saying, “You don't know that they're happy. They're dead. They're dead, Beena. Wake up.” There was a rustling as she rolled over in her sleeping bag, probably to face away from me, but I refused to open my eyes to check.

Uncle came by from time to time, but he couldn't look at us straight on. Sadhana said it was just that he didn't know what to say, the same thing that kept our friends away and made the clerks at the grocery store stuff our items into paper bags lickety-split, without any chitchat.

One time when Deana was out, Uncle came in and left his shoes on and stomped through to the kitchen where he began exclaiming over the dirty dishes on the counter. “What is this pigsty? Where is that woman? How did your mother raise you?”

“We were just about to do them, Uncle,” said Sadhana. “See how we stacked them into piles?” I was amazed by the fluidity of her lies. We were no sooner about to do the dishes than we were about to wash the windows or clean out the rain gutters.

On Sundays he brought us cash for groceries. He always handed it over in an envelope with my name on it, with a warning to me to keep close track of the contents. “You and your sister,” he said, “you go yourselves to the store. I am making you responsible.”

“Yes, Uncle,” I said, but every time after he left I gave it to Deana without even opening it. She was looking after us, and the money was her job. With all his business sense, Uncle should have been willing to accept a little collateral financial damage to keep us off his hands, but maybe he couldn't resist trying to hang on to such a good deal.

One day the phone rang and it was Freddy. He never said hello, only “Deana there?” but this time all he said was, “Put her on.”

I could tell it was a bad conversation. Deana was backing up as she listened, shrinking into a corner of the living room. She started out loud, then got quiet. Sadhana and I were lying on the rug playing an endless game of Crazy Eight Countdown, and I had just changed suits to hearts, a killer move for me, when Deana noticed us staring. She covered the mouthpiece by sticking it close to her chest and told us to go to the store to pick up stuff for burritos. She fished a ten-dollar bill out of her pocket and handed it to Sadhana.

When we came back, she was in the bath. Sadhana took the groceries to the kitchen and left them on the table. Whole-wheat tortillas, a tomato, and a head of lettuce, because we weren't sure what burritos were. Then we heard Deana crying in the bathroom, little sniffling sobs like sneezes, and when I tapped on the door, she told us to come in.

The bottom of her hair was hanging down into the tub, below the water, but the top of her head was dry. It seemed wrong and disorganized. Her clothes were lying in a little heap on the bathmat, and she had a glass beside her on the floor, beaded with condensation.

“Hi,” she said. She hunched forward, arms crossing, elbows on knees, brow resting on the back of her wrist. Her hair swung forward to either side of her face, like heavy drapes. “Don't be frightened. I'm just sad.”

Sadhana perched on the edge of the toilet seat and I crouched on the little stool that Mama used to sit on when she washed our hair. Deana had more freckles on her body than Mama had had, a wide patch spreading down her back from the base of her neck.

“I wish your mama was here,” said Deana.

This had become the usual refrain for us, more like a chorus to a silent song we'd all agreed upon than any longer a specific lament. Saying it was like a charm, or a secret handshake.

“Me too,” said Sadhana and I at the same time. That was the amen.

It turned out that the car Deana had borrowed from Freddy had been impounded without any warning at all except for the growing stack of parking tickets pulled out from under the wiper and tossed into the back seat. But she was caught off guard and Freddy was furious, and there was no way to get to the impound lot unless she could find someone to take her and lend her the money to pay the fee. I wondered if she would ask me to try to get the money from Uncle, and I knew I would if she asked. But she didn't.

She paddled her arms up and down a bit in the water. “It's Deana soup in here,” she said. “I feel like a boiled carrot.”

“Limp and orange,” guessed Sadhana.

“You got it.”

She made a move to get up, and we handed her some towels that, though no longer clean, had been refolded by Sadhana, who had the best knack of the three of us for getting crisp corners. Deana rubbed herself dry until she was pink and wearing something close to the tired expression that passed for smiling in our apartment. By the time she had her jeans on, we'd developed a game plan. She had the towel around her neck like a prizefighter, but she looked dazed enough to seem like she'd already been punched out.

“You'll go straight home and apologize again, then kiss him until he forgives you.” This was Sadhana's advice. “Wear something really sexy.”

“Just tell him you'll make it up to him,” I said. “However he wants.”

We watched as she put on a tight black sweater, gold earrings, and a fine dusting of turquoise eyeshadow.

“Wish me luck,” she said, kissing each of us at the door. She looked nervous. Her fingers were wrapped tight around the handles of her bag and her lips were almost white, like frozen raspberries left too long in the freezer.

“Luck,” said Sadhana. We locked the door behind her and went to the window, where we watched her sally forth to the bus stop, her long stride barely reined in by her high wedge sandals. Sadhana and I spent the rest of the evening eating crackers and resorting to Monopoly after our card game was derailed. On a lark, Sadhana had tossed the deck in the air, and we decided we were too lazy to pick them all up.

Deana came back just after midnight with five garbage bags of clothes and a cardboard box containing what she called the rest of her life. I peeked in and saw necklaces tangled in with seashells and headbands, a curling iron, and a pack of pastels. I carried it into Mama's bedroom and set it on the dresser, pushing to one side Mama's matching hand mirror and brush set with the mermaid handles that had belonged to her grandmother. I looked up to see Sadhana's reflection frowning at me.

“What?” I said into the vanity mirror. “She has to put her stuff somewhere.”

“Not there she doesn't.”

I shrugged and left it where it was, keeping one hand on it. Sadhana waited for a moment, then left the room.

Deana herself was quiet and didn't say much besides it was over. Freddy couldn't forgive her because the car was his baby and he'd had it even before he met Deana. Sadhana was outraged and called him a pig, which made Deana flinch.

“But it's true,” said Sadhana. “It's not like the car is gone, just towed. If he wasn't broke he could just go get it.”

“But he
is
broke,” said Deana. This was another way she was like Mama: never blaming other people for their feelings, even when the feelings in question were stupid.

I was glad about the breakup and said so. “This is so much better,” I told her a few days later, when she was mostly done with sitting in baths and crying. I was curled up on Mama's bed eating cookies, in sheets that were starting to feel gritty. I brushed away the newest crop of crumbs and they fell to the floor where they blended in with the wooden parquet. “Freddy wasn't good enough for you. And now you don't have to go back and forth all the time.”

“You're right,” she said. “This is better.” She sounded faraway, though, her words sagging as she rooted through a pile of clothes, looking for a clean shirt.

“Also,” I said, “there are plenty of fish in the sea.”

“That's what they say,” said Deana, pulling on a T-shirt and shaking out her hair like a wet dog. “But what am I going to do with a fish?”

Around noon one day Sadhana got a call from a school friend, and when she was done being surprised, she managed to accept an invitation to go swimming. By the time she put down the phone, I could see her shoulders pushing back, her pride taking hold. Whether it was her elation at being remembered by her friends or her relief at the prospect of getting out of the apartment, everything about her seemed more defined, as though she was focusing her gaze until it was sharp enough to see her out of the soft fog of our grief. She dug into her dresser, looking for a bathing suit.

“Don't go,” I said.

“Why not?”

“We haven't finished our game of crib.” Deana had bought us an amazing cribbage board with a little plastic skunk that popped up. And her brother had mailed us a bunch of card decks from real casinos. All the cards had two of their corners clipped to show they'd been used, and we were cycling through the packs during our games, trying to guess which decks were lucky or unlucky.

“We can finish when I get back.”

“What am I going to do?”

“I don't know. That's your problem.” Sadhana's shrugs were somehow always elegant.

I left the room and considered complaining to Deana, but instead I went and lay down in Mama's bed, pulling the quilts and the sweaty smell of sheets up around me, even though it was the hottest point of the day. I turned over a pillow and found that both sides were equally strewn with long, clinging strands of red and black hair. Mama would have told Sadhana to take me along, oblivious to the fact that she and I didn't share any friends and that tagging along ought to have been well below my dignity as the older sister. But Deana was part of the real world in a way that Mama never had been. Deana wouldn't allude to the social hierarchy of teenage girls, but she knew enough to realize that if I wasn't invited, I wasn't wanted.

I didn't know what it was about Deana, how she could make the air around herself soft, so it was easy to move through it to her, to get close. Not as hard as it was with some people — with most people, really. She was like Mama that way, but maybe even more so, since she had no expectations of us, and no rules.

At some point I fell into a hot and tossing sleep, and when I woke up I went into the kitchen, where Deana was eating a piece of toast and staring out at the balcony. She looked at me and said, “Have you been sleeping? You should get out of the house.”

“I don't have anywhere to go.”

“Go for a walk. Pick up some groceries while you're at it. I'll make you a list.”

“Okay.” I stood by while Deana wrote out a list in her neat printing, then handed it to me along with some money.

“I have a yoga workshop to teach, so take your keys.” I nodded. “And take your time too. If you don't get some exercise, I'm going to have to drag you to class one of these days.”

It was the first time, apart from trips to the bathroom, that I'd been alone since Mama's accident. I knew where the store was, but it was strange to have to think about how to get there since I was so used to following. I walked two blocks in the wrong direction, out of habit maybe, or some secret mission known only to my feet, before stopping up short in front of a fish shop that smelled bad enough to snap me back to attention. At the grocery store, when I finally got there, everything went smoothly except for when I saw the sympathetic cashiers, whose look of open pity was almost too much for me to bear alone.

“You take care now, darling,” said one of them. I almost started bawling.

When I came back, bags swinging from the crooks of my arms, I saw Deana sitting low on the front stoop, arms resting on piles of garbage bags to either side. She was wearing a backpack and a cap pulled low on her forehead against the sun. A queen on a black polyethylene throne.

I called out to her when I got close. “Deana!”

Her shoulders jumped, and one hand flew to her hat. “Goodness, honey, you scared me.” She pulled me to her, and I toppled over onto the pile of bags.

“Mind the groceries,” I said. I was worried the eggs were going to smash. “What's going on?”

A green Thunderbird pulled up, Freddy's car, rescued somehow from the tow lot in the far industrial reaches of the city. And it was Freddy, I guessed, behind the wheel, who passed his eyes over me for the briefest of moments before bending his head to pop the trunk.

“Sweetheart, I've got to go,” said Deana. “I'll see you later, okay?” With a loud smack she planted a kiss on my cheek, just next to my ear, and started throwing garbage bags into the car.