Precious (32 page)

Sissy feels it, a jolt that shoots through her limbs, making her want to run.

“It’s Vicki. It’s Vicki Anderson,” Eva says.

Confused, Sissy grimaces and readjusts. She pulls away, though not entirely. She hasn’t thought about Vicki Anderson in what seems like days. She hasn’t conjured her since putting her image in its proper place, one that satisfied Sissy and left the world unscathed: Vicki, her best friend who magically grew wings, Vicki the girl who flew away, happily, into another place altogether.

Eva’s voice calls her back to the reality of the moment. “They
found
her,” she says. “She’s dead.”

“Here?”

“You don’t understand.” Eva pulls her close and holds her tightly
again. Sissy tenses as she hears the word she has never understood, a word that hangs lifeless in the air: Dead. Dead, dead, dead. This, finally, is what cements the moment—the thud of the word in Eva’s mouth, the finality of it on Eva’s tongue. She pulls, wrenching as Eva tries to hold her. She steps back over the wire cables, over discarded wrappers, sticky with caramel. She sees only her blurry sneakers, the dirty ground. Nearby a generator roars to life, the belts moving suddenly, making her jump. Sissy calls Eva a liar—she yells this, saying Eva is an outright lying liar—and then she pulls away farther, out of Eva’s reach. A space widens between them, filled with the word that Eva said, and in that space the word grows and becomes frighteningly forceful, with its own sound, a low dead hum. She runs. As the crowd moves, she moves with it, away from Eva, away from everything that confuses her and everything that hurts. She follows the lights. She heads toward music that grows louder. She darts through the mass of people. She turns at the corner of a concession stand.

Exhausted, her breath spent, she stops at the carousel, sees a smoky gray stallion with its front legs raised in a gallop, its empty saddle adorned with grape leaves. As it glides by, its rump changes, not a horse but a mermaid’s tail. A white mare raises her left hoof, prancing, and on her sides, suddenly, green scales. Above the murals, gilded mirrors breeze by, and she sees only repetitions of herself

She runs over ground covered with sawdust and peers into the big top: the suspended lights, the interplay of shadows. People perched in the bleachers roar with laughter and clap and cheer. Against the canvas wall, a man with a pockmarked face stands, his skin tight and eyes sharp and small. A cigarette hangs from his fingers, which he then extinguishes under the heel of his boot. When he turns toward Sissy, she notices a bird perched on his shoulder. The bird bobs its head up and down. It flashes its wings and they open in a taunting way.

Sissy’s heart races. “Do you work here?” she whispers.

“Today I do,” the man says, looking away, back to the rings. “Maybe not tomorrow if I make a woman angry tonight.”

She thinks to tell him she’s lost but doesn’t. She doesn’t want to go back to Eva. She doesn’t want to hear Eva say that awful word again, and not simply to say it but to say it in a way that made it seem all too true. Sissy inhales the sawdust, the deep musky scent of animals and dung. She listens as the man with a top hat bellows into the microphone: “Everything is a wonder here. Everything is a spectacle!” The magnetic pull of his voice, the magician’s look about him, willing the crowd’s gaze, directing it above him to where the lights suddenly flash on. Exuberant, in motion, a woman in pink tights flies into the air only to be caught by a man who falls backward, his hands grabbing hers. The crowd claps. Clowns weave through the bleachers with their wide-painted grins, their masses of bright red hair. They hold buckets, swaying them unpredictably. A drum roll sounds. And then not water but a burst of confetti, thrown high into the air, floating down like snow. Shrieking, wild laughter. In the ring, a poodle with a tutu walks on its hind legs. In the center ring a lion roars. Suspended above the animal, twenty feet in the air, a woman spins on a rope, a twirl of rhinestones, crimson peacock feathers. Sissy’s heart races to see a woman dangling above the lion’s mouth.

She feels the bird’s eye on her. “Have you seen a little girl?” she asks the man. “Have you seen my Gypsy mother?”

“Seen lots of girls,” the man says, keeping his eye on the woman, the waiting lion. The drum roll sounds harder. “Seen some Gypsy women, too.”

Confused, Sissy squints. “Where are the Gypsies, then, the ones who take children?”

“Oh, those,” he tells her. He grins and produces from his pocket a kernel of corn. The bird takes it gently in its long beak, flaps its black wings again. “I’m one of those. But they’re all over, Gypsies. Take your pick.”

“Is he your pet?”

“Him?” The man pets the bird’s feathers, and under his fingers they turn black-emerald, black-blue. “Found him when he was young, practically
dead on the road. Never heard a damn peep out the bird, doesn’t ever sing. Doesn’t fly off.”

“I’m running off,” she says. “I’m running away. Tonight.”

“Suit yourself,” he tells her. “Doesn’t bother me.”

Her chest restricts. She cannot keep up with the motion in the tent, the changing circles, the spaces that are emptied and filled again. She thinks of Vicki, how Vicki wanted to be a performer. What is dead, anyway? Not to shift shape but to be gone, gone and never seen, gone forever, with no hope of coming home.

Outside, Sissy runs, mulling over Eva’s words, over the word “dead” and Eva’s expression as she told Sissy this. How the worry held Eva’s face. She wants to believe that her sister is a liar. In that moment she ran away, she did believe it. Still what Eva said was different from the stories of the summer; her delivery of the news serious, her hands pinching Sissy’s sides as if she wanted to hold her there, to keep her from running. The way Eva spoke the words, the cadence of her voice, matched the lines of worry in her face, as if she didn’t want to hurt Sissy at all.

She moves toward the field. Better the Gypsies, then, she thinks. Better the Gypsies who steal away children than children who go missing and then later are found dead.

Amy marvels as she surveys the crowd. She sways, almost hypnotically, as she strains to see past the entry booths to the attractions. After her mother came over to babysit Sophie, Amy surprised Peter by dressing up for the evening in new pants and a blouse that fell just off her shoulders. He takes this as a good sign, one that’s hopeful despite everything. She’s asked about Eva several times—mostly when they are in bed, when the lights are out and her mind wanders—and he knows she hasn’t let go, that she is still playing out possibilities, doubting his explanations. Eva is no longer the girl who delighted him, the girl who made him feel new. Instead she is that girl with the crush, a girl out of hand, a girl with a problem. As he tells Amy this again and again, as he reinvents
Eva, the story shapes itself as true; they both begin to believe it. His betrayal lessens. Through comforting lies they grow closer because—it occurs to Peter—neither of them entirely wishes for the stark, deliberate clarity of truth. The girl could hardly be trusted to tell the truth. If she didn’t believe him, she could talk to the other teachers. She could talk to the teachers and they would tell her the same damn thing.

To soothe Amy, he’s also planned an impromptu vacation before the start of school, away from the house, away from everything. He’s spoken to her of white sands, skeletal strands of the barrier reefs, a house on the ocean where, at night, with the windows open, they would hear only the sound of water, the swelling tides. Amy agreed to this, wanting, he thought, to believe. “We need it, don’t we?” she asked him, her voice straining.

Only sometimes when he is alone, after Amy has drifted off to sleep and he is there in that same darkness, do his lies hit him with a force and weight. In those moments a murmur escapes from him, a regret, a sigh, something absent of words altogether, something that, in the next moment, to survive, to keep what he loves close, he dismisses again altogether.

He watches Amy now as she takes in the crowd, her eyes never lingering on anything too long. Her body moves with the music and he sees her again as the girl on the quad, dancing from building to building, light, free. “What should we do first?” he asks, looping his arm around her.

“I don’t know,” Amy says, still looking. “I haven’t been to a circus in years. I used to love them when I was a kid.”

Peter agrees, though, in truth, he doesn’t view things the way she views them. What he sees is a gathering place for the bizarre and for the slightly idiotic, the warped sense of everything—the fat, bloated woman who looks as though she’s spent years taking up water; the man with snakes coiling around his neck; the booths that promise the greatest spectacles on earth and then, when you step behind the curtains, when you squeeze into the small, cramped spaces, reveal only a mirror,
a distorted vision of yourself. He says, “Did you see that guy at the tilt-a-whirl? Some poor bastard turned bright red, and the guy just smiled and kept cranking the machine. They probably take bets on who they can get to vomit.”

“Maybe,” Amy says, still looking around. “It wouldn’t surprise me. My cousin got sick on that ride once. She and I used to go to the circus every summer. There was one that came through, and it was all we could talk about for days. My poor mother, she couldn’t keep up with us. We had to go on everything at least once, some rides we’d go on repeatedly, like we knew the minute the circus left we wouldn’t remember the feeling, so we had to cram it all in, whatever we could, or we’d miss it.” Amy’s voice trails off

Peter pulls her closer. He breathes deeply, glad to be in the night air, perhaps a bit giddy himself, to be following strings of lights that seem to ask nothing of him. He thinks again of his family, of all of them away at the beach, the newly rented house. He kisses her hair.

“The older I get, the more I have to look back on,” Amy says. She pauses, looks around, for what, Peter doesn’t know. “And the less I want to lose, I suppose.”

She eyes him now, and he feels a tinge of discomfort, a question in her starting to form again. “The older I get,” he tells her, “the less in my life I remember.”

Her face changes again, and he shifts uncomfortably, promising himself he’ll do better. He promises himself he will be better for Amy for the baby. He will never be so foolish as to let a girl come between them. Eva. (He allows himself to say her name, though thinking about her fills him with a quiet embarrassment.) He tells himself a girl like Eva is bound to bounce back, a girl like Eva has so many options.

Amy climbs into a carousel carriage and watches as Peter mounts a camel with a long golden beard and black eyes. He snaps a photo of her as she leans forward, her hand resting on the scrolled artwork, a quixotic look on her face, the stuffed dinosaur he won for Sophie next to her. A metal arm extends from the edge of the canopy, with a series of rings.

“Let me,” Amy says, taking the camera. “Grab one when we go past,” she tells him. “It’s supposed to be good luck.”

The music cranks, and each time they whirl by the rings, Peter lunges forward, his fingers straining right to their tips. They slip by his hand, the cool metal taunting him. On his fifth try he snags one that releases with a ping.

“For you,” he says, giving it to her. He holds it up. “I thought it was supposed to be brass?”

“Brass rings?” Amy laughs again, and he cannot tell what she’s thinking. She snaps a photograph, hiding her face. “That’s just something they tell kids, Peter. The rings are all steel, didn’t you know that? It’s just a story.”

Away from everything, Sissy moves swiftly, to the field next to the fire-house. She doesn’t know how she got here exactly, only that her feet moved and that her body, driven by the day, followed, and that it didn’t matter to her that her father would be angry, or that Eva might be searching for her frantically, desperately. She stops, not yet aware that she is moving toward the train. Next to a darkened RV, two horses graze behind a makeshift fence. A bay gelding noses the remnants of molasses on the ground. A buckskin looks up inquisitively as Sissy climbs the first metal rail and feels the structure wobble. She isn’t supposed to be here; she isn’t supposed to be alone. She makes a
click-click
noise with her tongue and the buckskin reaches with its muzzle, toward her outstretched fingers. She feels velvet and coarse hair, a nibbling at her palm. She smells the urine-drenched straw. “I’m leaving,” she says to the horse. Flies buzz around the buckskin’s eyes and back. It lashes its tail from side to side and stomps the ground.

She looks back, toward the lights. Everything happens at a quickened pace, a blur. She sprints along the darkening sky, a flash of glittery silver, a girl. At the tracks, she jumps over the many zigzagging rails and onto the rocky surface between the ties. She works her way past the long
cars and flatbeds that smell of tar and diesel. She runs her hand over the rough surface, still warm from the sun. One flatbed, two flatbeds, three flatbeds, empty. She looks under the cars as she might have once looked under the bed for monsters. She passes a closed boxcar. Sissy jumps, but she cannot reach the lever to slide the door along the metal runner. She passes another boxcar made from old barn wood, the shapes of plywood uneven and rickety. The car stands open, wide like a terrifying mouth— tempting tonight, such darkness. Her hands touch the wooden surface. She feels the prick of a splinter as it lodges itself under her flesh, deep, penetrating. She stands on tiptoes to peer in, debating. Here she might wait until she feels the train in motion beneath her, and then she will be gone, gone from everyone in this confusing summer, gone from death itself, gone to be with those faces who once frightened her, the waiting Gypsies who have always called her name.

Resolved, she hoists herself up as she might in gym class. Her legs dangle for a moment; her feet scratch the gravel, disrupting it. Her body strains. She peers in. Using all her strength, she lifts herself higher until her knees scrape along the surface of the car. She crawls and disturbs the resting flies. The air closes around her. She can see only shapes and shadows, and, frightened, she turns toward the distant lights again, the muffled sounds of music and people. She moves along the wall, inching along, groping the wooden boards. She moves cautiously, the hairs on her neck on end. She holds her breath and eases deeper into the car, the straw crunching beneath her feet. She squints, trying to bring shadows into view, and can sense it there—precise, raw—the presence of something waiting to devour her, to take her, finally.