Precious (34 page)

When Frank called from the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, Natalia had just poured a drink—a shot of vodka from the liquor cabinet. She was so shaky. The flush of liquid—raw to her taste buds, hot in her throat—soothed her nerves and kept her hands from shaking, as they had been for the last two hours, since seeing the girl. She delivered the pronouncement as a newspaper reporter might—distanced, her voice
drained of emotion. She described the scene, and Frank grew quiet, listening. She knew how angry he was, hearing everything—the girl’s bruised lower parts. “I’ll get the kids,” he told her. “Don’t rush,” she said. “I need a few minutes, to process, to let it sink in, to let some of it go. The girls—Sissy, my God! They were about the same age.” He told her both Eva and Sissy were fine, that nothing was going to happen to the girls tonight.

After she hung up, she went from room to room and turned on all the lamps. The entire downstairs glowed, while upstairs the windows remained dark. It didn’t exactly cheer her mood—it was unlikely anything would—but the light at least made her feel better, as if she weren’t alone.

How awful that small room had been, how it had smelled of chemicals and bleach, and how, when she, Milly and Ginny had walked down the hallway, everything around her had been held in suspension: the lights above them hanging from metal poles, the stationary exit sign at the end of the corridor, the tense hum from the wired equipment in a nearby room, a framed print of a forest and stream hanging on the wall. She couldn’t help but laugh at that awful print. It was meant, she supposed, to cheer the place, to alleviate the stiff angularity of the building. At the door, Ginny’s legs buckled. Still, at least Ginny didn’t cry anymore. Natalia couldn’t have handled tears. She sensed that all Ginny’s tears had been spent already, used up in the two months of waiting, and that this was the last thing to do, the last door to close. Natalia held her up, drew her close, and whispered: “At least you’ll know. At least you won’t go on in life, wondering.” Ginny had turned white. It was so cold, like a bitter cold of winter, like the snow crashing down on skin, except there was no snow, only a metallic light that hung over everything. Air pulsed through the vents, and Natalia imagined a chill on the metal tables. A policeman was there, too, the same man, Milly said, who first went over to Ginny’s house months ago: a mere boy. Natalia judged him to be in his twenties. His manner was serious, intent on giving the news and showing Ginny the body—”a body,” he said, and Natalia thought:
Just a body, and not a girl.
You could see it in the officer, the dread and weariness that his job caused, especially on days like this. She had seen it before in the guards, in the camp, that desire to get through with a task and to leave, to go home to family, if they had one to go to at all; or, if not, to get through it and then go out, have a beer, have six beers, forget. He grimaced and his voice turned over to a whisper. “This is the worst part of my job,” he said apologetically. He took off his hat. “I hate it.”

Everything was metallic and edged. The sheen distracted Natalia, gave her eyes things to wander to: the square table with instruments precisely laid, scissors and knives with thin, sharp blades; a wall of silver chambers, a piece of paper placed in the name tag slot. The entire room had the quality of something compulsively ordered. It emanated a sense of control, an antiseptic distance. She whispered to Ginny but Ginny was gone, Natalia could see that. A man came into the room, skinny, his forehead creased with age and framed by the thin skullcap that hugged his head. He reminded Natalia of the bird man from so long ago, except this man had a clean face and full lips and looked rested. Perhaps the bird man had been rested, too, though, and Natalia made him tired only by memory, forcing him to perform the same task over and over again.

“I don’t feel well,” Milly said to Natalia. “I’m sorry.” Natalia watched as she turned the corner down the flat corridor. Natalia concentrated on the task at hand. It wasn’t about her but about Ginny. “Ginny,” she said. “Just force yourself to look, and in a minute it’ll be over.” It was a lie, of course. It would never be over. Ginny would play out the scene over and over until, after years of exhaustion, she might finally be able to let some of it go, maybe even learn to smile again, to laugh—how far away that was, but how that time waited for her in the distance, another place altogether.

“Just one look,” she told Ginny. “Just one, Ginny, and no more.”

The man approached. The bird man. A faint dizziness came over her—something chemical, perhaps, clinging to his scrubs, something like bleach burning her nostrils. She refused to look away, for Ginny, for
the woman who, after all, was her friend. “We’re ready,” she said, helping Ginny forward.

Though she should have felt little shock at how horrific life could be, though it seemed her past might have prepared her for this, it did nothing to alleviate the shock, the quiet terror that filled her when the man folded back the sheet and life was reduced, in measure, by smaller scales: not an adult but a child there, the frail bones and thin arms, the unshaped, bloated body, the tilt of the head and soft line of the jaw, the marks by her neck, thumbprints that had turned black. The thin ribs, the small pucker of breasts not yet formed. The table swallowed the child on all sides. There were bruises on her body that even death didn’t hide, and a snaking wound that peeked out from the lip of the folded sheet that covered the body. The man with the skullcap kept the girl’s right arm covered, but Natalia could still see the jagged, torn flesh. No blood, not now. Even the girl’s face alarmed Natalia. She might have expected the last pain of death, the twisted expression she’d seen before, how the dead’s last moments trailed them into eternity, to the next life, to whatever was around the corner between here and there. But what she found was worse, ironic—a face that despite the ravaged body and bruises seemed only at peace, as if she’d simply shut her eyes and slept. That was a look that filled Natalia with a quiet terror. That was a look that would follow her into her dreams that night.

“Don’t remember this,” Natalia said. “Remember her the way she was.”

She took in air. She held Ginny tighter, felt Ginny’s entire body go limp again. She stiffened her hold. She waited.

“No, no, no, no,” Ginny said. A whisper.

“Something,” the man with the skullcap said, “got ahold of her arm. We think maybe an animal.”

A wolf,
Natalia thought.
The child was devoured by a wolf.

“That’s not Vicki,” Ginny said, shaking her head. Her eyes had gone blank. Her voice was hard like a pebble. She stepped back. She
shook her head again. Natalia let her go. “That’s not Vicki,” she said again. “That’s somebody else’s baby. That’s somebody else’s girl.”

Both Natalia and Milly took Ginny home. They stopped first at Ginny’s house and collected items from her bedroom: clothing and a toothbrush, a hairbrush, a few nightgowns, some creams and floss, shorts and shirts, underwear.

“Do you need anything?” Natalia asked Milly as they parted ways on the street.

“It wasn’t my little girl,” Ginny said, looking up.

“We’ll take care of her,” Milly said. “She can stay with us as long as she needs.” To Natalia’s surprise, the old woman reached for her, too, and hugged her suddenly.

The air felt good, the motion. She focused on her feet, on the sound of her soles as they hit the pavement. Everything around her was sharp, the sky not black but a deep velvety blue, the stars jeweled in the night. The streetlights hummed, teemed with small bugs. A breeze. A house light at Mrs. Stone’s was on. The Schultzes’ schnauzer was out in the yard. Natalia passed and it sent up a bark.

The drink. The lights. She was tired. She could have slept for a long time, hours, decades, millennia, but she couldn’t stand the thought of closing her eyes and slipping into another world that might, if her dreams turned against her, be even worse than the day, made more horrific in the aftermath and amplified to cataclysmic proportions.

In the kitchen she cuts vegetables for soup, as her own mother did when she heard about the invasion. She cuts an onion, realizing how profoundly absurd rituals are, incantations to keep away sorrow, those small things we do to cushion ourselves from blows, to hope against no hope. The world could be torn to pieces, bombs could fall and cities could fall, and they often did. People could die. Children could die, too. There could be rubble left, dogs barking. It all happened. All of it.

She finishes her drink.

Sometime later, moments, minutes, hours, Natalia hears the kitchen door slam, then the rush of feet, the sobbing screams, the curses from Eva first, and then from Frank, everything garbled and fragmented. Natalia gets up from the couch and rushes into the hallway in time to have Eva push past her, her hand held up to her face, and there, in her nostril, crusted blood, a shine on the cheek, a net of red-black lines spidering across her flesh. “I told you,” Eva is saying, her voice breathless and straining, “if you ever touched me again. If you ever.” Frank is behind her, the force of his energy tangible, fisted, balled. How everything turns in him, how an unmitigated hatred fills him, momentarily, one that will change, over the following hours, to regret—immense regret. But now the line of his jaw clenches. The air around him burns with electricity.

“Everything that comes out of your mouth is a fucking lie,” he yells.

Jarred by the broken silence, Natalia rushes instinctively after Eva, but Frank grabs her. The table in the hallway wobbles under her weight. Eva maneuvers away from both of them. There is noise—so much noise—Frank’s screams, Natalia’s questions, and the slam of Eva’s bedroom door, the elevated pitch of “What did you do?” And there is Frank screaming about what Sissy told him, a truth she should never have spoken. And all this is heard through open windows, from the lit house on the street. In the confusion, Sissy is left to herself. She crawls under the kitchen table, feeling bits of dirt and sand against her palms as she does. She draws her legs up and waits.

The story goes like this.

The story goes like this …

“What happened?” Natalia is yelling. “What did you do?”

“I don’t know,” Frank yells. “What was I supposed to do?”

If the world were Sissy’s, and if Sissy were wondrous and death a thing that hardly existed, she might be able to save Eva. She might run after her, screaming,
I’m coming for you! I’m coming for you, Eva!
If the world were magical, she would send her apologies over the distance;
they would rain down over Eva like hundreds and hundreds of flowers falling suddenly from the sky; they would soothe her, mend everything. But the world, finally, is not hers to bend or re-create. The world is something else entirely. She crouches down more. A drop of blood on the floor—she wipes it with her finger, makes a circle. She closes her eyes and disappears.

It is sometimes impossible to measure the time, to order things and place them in the past and leave them there for good, as one might turn one’s back to a fire and walk away. At some point, after the door to her parents’ bedroom closes, after the voices recede into a thin wash of agitated whispers, Sissy crawls out from under the table and tentatively tiptoes past her parents’ bedroom door, each step laid softly, a ghost. Cautiously through the hallway, up the stairs. Her parents finally as unknowable as the day itself. A dead friend, a bloodied sister, how everything in a moment conflates, and how her thoughts settle finally on Eva. Upstairs she knocks on Eva’s door, a
bumpity-bump-bump
rhythm. Then, when it seems the door will never open, she hears a click. Eva’s phone lies on the bed. Sissy stands dumbly as Eva flits frantically around her room, gathering clothes without any thought: only one pair of underwear, one pair of jeans, five different T-shirts, two skirts. She stuffs them into an army bag.

Sissy moves to the edge of her bed, her fingers touching the cotton cover. The blood in Eva’s nose is caked now. Black streaks of mascara snake down her cheeks. Sissy bites her nail, making it bleed, too. She bites the inside of her cheek, to do the same.

“What are you doing?”

“You know, Sissy.”

“I don’t.”

“I’m leaving.”

Eva pulls rings from her jewelry box and slides them onto her fingers, one by one, until there is a succession of silver.

“Are you coming back?”

“I don’t know,” Eva says, crying now. She gathers more clothing. She opens her closet and pulls out a few more skirts, stripping them from hangers. She leaves her books on her dresser.

“Can I come?”

“No.”

“Why not?” Sissy leans against the bed, uses it for support.

For the first time since Sissy has entered, Eva stops what she’s doing. She stands at a distance, across from Sissy, and makes an indecipherable face, not knowing what else to say. Finally, she tells her, “I’d take you if I could, but they’d just get you. They’d probably accuse me of kidnapping you or something. They’d probably call the cops. They’d do that if I took the car. They’d sure as hell do that if I took you.” Her voice trails off. Sissy shifts uncomfortably, leaning on her left side, trying to consider this. She smooths the bedspread, the roses that look like cuts.

“You can have my lip gloss,” Eva says, tossing it to her.

Sissy looks at the orange tube lying in her open palm. She doesn’t remember even catching it. “Thanks,” she says, studying it, waiting.

“You can have whatever else you want, too.” Eva gathers a few more items: a nightgown, a halter top, a pair of sneakers. Outside, somewhere in front of the house, a car horn sounds once—shrill.

“Don’t go,” Sissy says. “Stay.”

“Not here,” she says. “But I’ll see you around, you know?”

If running away were a game,
Sissy thinks. It is over—the fighting, the racket—though it still clings to her, still feels raw. And Eva is packing the last of her items. And Eva is saying goodbye. In this moment Sissy cannot think to reach for her sister. In this moment she can barely speak.

Eva stares at her, blinks hard. “How much do you love me?” she asks.