Текст книги "First, Body: Stories"

Автор книги: Melanie Rae Thon

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 9 страниц)

What are we doing? I asked.

Only dancing, he said.

Yes, dancing. There’s no harm in it. But later it was more a droop and drag, a slow waltz, one of us too drunk to stand.

The old man sat at a table in the back, holding his head in his hands. I saw how wrong I’d been. No angels here. The scarred man and the twins left. I was alone, reeling with the boy called Dez.

He ran his hands along my hips, pressed me into him. I said, You’re young enough to be my kid.

But I’m not, he said.

He wrapped his fingers around my neck. He said, Listen, baby, I’m low on cash.

One last chance. I bought my freedom, gave him fifty-two dollars, all I had. He stuck it down his boot. I thought he’d vanish then, blow out the door, a swirl of smoke. But he said, Let’s go outside. This cowboy’s got to get some air.

In my car, he kissed me in that stupid way, all tongue and no breath. I lost my head. Then we were driving somewhere, snow-blind, no seatbelts, nothing to strap us in. I saw broken glass, our bright bodies flying into tiny bits.

I took him home. Who can explain this? His long hair smelled of mud. I found damp leaves hidden in his pockets. His palms were cool on my forehead. He opened me. With his tongue, he traced the scar across my belly. It was wet and new. In a room years away I heard a child crying.

I expected him to steal everything. He touched the bones of my pelvis as if remembering the parts of me, veins of my hands, sockets of my eyes. Like a sister, he said. I thought he whispered Darling just before we slept.

In the morning he disappeared. Took my sleeping bag and cigarettes.

Then the phone rang and a voice said, Your mother, gone.

Imagine.

Everyone you love is missing. The voice on the phone never tells me this. The voice says, Body, arrangements. The voice says, Your brother’s on his way. You can meet him here. I don’t argue. I say, Yes. But I don’t go to the hospital. I know I’ll never catch them there.

Hours gone. While you danced. While you lay naked in your bed. That’s what the voice in my own skull says.

I go to the ravine where the wounded elk staggers between pines. It’s always November here, always snowing. It’s the night my father died. It’s the morning my mother is dying.

Sky is gray, snow fills it. Trees bend with ice, limbs heavy. I climb down, no tracks to follow. Snow higher than my boots already, a cold I hardly notice. I forget my body. How will I find them if they don’t want me?

Flakes cluster, the size of children’s palms now. They break against my head and back, so light I cannot feel them. I glimpse shapes, trees in wind shifting, clumps of snow blown from them, big as men’s fists, big as stones falling. They burst. Silent bombs, scattering fragments.

Nothing nothing happens. Nothing hurts me.

And then I see them. He’s wearing his plaid coat and wool pants, a red cap with earflaps. She wears only her pink nightgown. He carries her. She’s thin as a child but still a burden, and the snow is deep, and I see how he struggles. I could call out, but they’ll never hear me. I can’t speak in these woods. A shout would make the sky crumble. All the snow that ever was would bury me.

Deeper and deeper, the snow, the ravine. He never slows his pace. He never turns to look for me. Old man, slumped shoulders. All I ever wanted was to touch him, his body, so he could heal me, with his hair and bones, the way a saint heals. I hear my own breath. I stumble. How does he keep going?

Now I climb the steep slope. With every step I’m slipping. The distance between them and me keeps growing. I know I’ll lose them. I know the place it happens. I know the hour. Dusk, the edge of the woods. The white elk takes flight as an owl in absolute silence. Wings open a hole in the sky, and a man and a woman walk through it.

No one says, Go back. No one says, You’ll die here. But the cold, I feel it. My own body, I’m back in it.

I can stay. I can lie down. Let the snow fall on my face. Let its hands be tender.

Or I can walk, try to find my way in darkness.

I’m a grown woman, an orphan, I have these choices.

BODIES OF WATER

ELENA SEES HERSELF as the boy did: a woman on the Ave., alone in the U District. It’s late afternoon, January. He’s hunched in a doorway. After a half-hour watching women, he chooses her. She’s the one in the red raincoat, easy to track, light-boned and skittery.

He strikes hard, punches her left kidney. Slits the strap of her purse. Kicks the backs of her legs.

She twists, staggered; glimpses a boy in a black jacket sprinting down an alley.

Someone touches her shoulder.

Someone asks, Are you okay?

Elena’s on her knees. She feels little hands still pressed against her ribs. Short fingers. Wide palms. He’s a tough boy. She remembers the extra push, the second kick. He wants her down. He leaves her there.

This is the bridge on the West Seattle Freeway.

The only way home.

Elena’s stuck in traffic. There’s been an accident again, third time this month: another car crushed into the guardrail, another woman standing stunned in the rain.

Home at last but not safe, Elena Brissard doesn’t tell her husband about the accident or the thief. He’s too comfortable, listening to the cheerful flutes of his Vivaldi. Eating olives, drinking Tanqueray.

And she doesn’t tell her daughter.

Iris lies on the bed in her basement room, dead poet crying in her skull. She loves him above all others, this wailing boy who pulled his own trigger: heroin first to ease the passage, shotgun to be sure. Through the windows of his greenhouse, he watched clouds and mountains grow very small.

Elena’s guessing. Iris uses headphones, always, so the bitter riffs of his guitar are only vibrations buzzing in the kitchen floor.

Elena flicks the light on the stairs and waits in the hallway. These are the rules. She’s forbidden to enter her daughter’s room or knock too loudly.

Iris lifts one headphone.

Is she hungry?

No, never mind.

She’d rather stay here, with him, than sit at the table with Elena and Geoffrey. Elena doesn’t know why she keeps inviting. Iris is the hunger artist. She hasn’t eaten with them since she disappeared for eight days last July. Not stolen. She ran away. These kids just vanish, the policeman told them. Fall into cracks in the street. He wasn’t trying to be cruel. He said there was a jungle under I-5, tents and shacks hidden in trees, a city beneath the city. You want my advice? he said. Pray.

Elena lights tapers while Geoffrey pops the cork on a bottle of pouilly-fuissé. A boy looking through these windows could mistake them for lovers. They eat cold salmon dipped in hollandaise. Pale green hearts of artichokes. Brilliant raspberries.

So polite, husband and wife, each asking, How was your day? He’s gotten a shipment from Cape Dorset: musk ox and caribou, whales scooped from whalebone, a green owl carved by a blind man who listens to the stones until they speak their shapes. Geoffrey says, A perfect piece – you have to close your eyes to see its wings. But Elena knows it’s old work he loves most, yellowed ivory: a hermaphrodite with walrus tusks, a bear with six legs. The Inuit say, There are things in nature man must not explain. He can’t sell these. They belong in museums. Behind glass. Safe. He stuffs them in socks or rolls them in pillowcases. His rooms are full of strange creatures. Open any box in any closet and you’ll find one, wrapped like a little mummy.

How can Elena judge him? She lives in his house on the hill. Drives his blue Mazda. Drinks his Courvoisier.

There should be bars on these windows. That’s what Iris says. Iris says, You’re a hostage – just like me.

The boy who snatched Elena’s purse is fifty-seven dollars richer tonight and still soaked, still shivering, looking for a place to sleep. But tonight, thanks to Elena, he’s not hungry. He’s gorged himself: three burgers, a chocolate milkshake. He can smoke all he wants, one cigarette after another, no rationing. He has money for a second pack and a third one in the morning. Tonight, Elena thinks, he almost forgives me.

This is the totem pole, Pioneer Square, two days later: raven and otter squat one on top of the other, mindless in the wind and rain.

No wild children here, just trembling men with broken teeth. They have hands like Elena’s father’s. Unsteady. They drink from bottles in paper bags. Leave green glass splintered in the street.

Elena sips cappuccino in a warm Café. Three-dollar cup of foam. That’s what Iris would say. Iris makes her want to leave this place.

Outside, they’re starving.

Outside, the sky’s gone yellow.

Elena leans into the wind because she lacks weight. In every stoop she sees an old man’s face.

Do the men with cracked skin care how she wastes her money? No. Do they sputter or beg? No. They murmur. Three dollars. Nothing.

Then she spots him, the boy again, her little thief. He’s found her already, miles from the Ave., here at the other end of the city.

Not him, but one like him.

Just another boy wearing a hooded sweatshirt under a black jacket.

He crouches in a cul-de-sac. Drenched. He’s been expecting her. He grins. Yes, it’s me, he says. Not out loud. Not in a way that anyone besides Elena hears. Tiny hands slip through her ribcage. Wind blows through her chest.

They hate us.

All these lost kids.

She walks fast. Cars spray water from her ankles to her neck. She catches her own reflection in wavy glass, listens to her own heels click on cement.

At the car, she sees how stupid she’s been. Her door, unlocked. She’s asking for it. Years ago, before Geoff, there were boys in her father’s orchard, brown hands on white wrists. Their tongues in her mouth were the only words they shared.

She married Geoff to stop all that. Her dangerous self-forgetting. Her accidents.

Now that smell is in her car. Smoke and spit, something damp and too familiar, the leaves where she lay down, played dead. She’s afraid to check the back seat or glance in the rearview mirror. If she looks, she thinks she’ll conjure one of them. Fruit picker’s son. Migrant. Her father told her he’d throttle any daughter he caught with one of them. Throttle. When he said the word, his hands in air gripped an imaginary neck.

Elena’s home again. That safe house on the hill.

The boy’s across the water, trapped on the other side of the bridge. No one can touch her. No father will call to curse or raise his fist. She chooses when to go to him. Poor old man, lost in his own front yard. Kind nurses lead him to his door again and again. Where’s Esther? he says. He forgets his wife is dead. Sometimes he calls and calls, then weeps when she won’t answer him. He thinks three nurses who come in shifts are all the same man. They have skin murky as nights in the orchard. You could disappear in them. Daddy’s nurses have big thighs, thick chests. The better to lift you, my dear. Her father’s thin but still heavy. She imagines bowels full of stones, Daddy digging rocks, eating fast. The nurses call him Baby. Cut his meat in tiny bits. Change his soiled pants.

If you wait long enough, everyone you fear will come to this.

Elena stares out the window, watching green clouds scud and swell. Two messages on the machine. Geoffrey says he’s working late. Sorry, sweetheart. Iris says, My ride split. She might be stranded, might sleep in a shelter on the Ave. This is as kind as Iris gets. She means, Don’t worry. I’m not down in the jungle yet.

Waves of rain break hard on glass. Elena runs from room to room, popping lights, rolling towels along the sills, but the rain has no heart, no shape it has to keep, no head – the rain flows through every crack. She wants Iris to call again. Please come. She’d go anywhere. Yes, even in this. When the phone rings at last, it’s only Geoff. He can’t get home. Pileup on the bridge. He’ll have to sleep at the office. He says, I’ll call you back.

But this never happens.

An hour later the whole hill goes dark; the phone goes dead.

Now it’s Elena and the storm. The two of them. She torches last night’s candles. Shadows jump against the walls. Elena’s jittery hand. Elena’s own head. She hasn’t eaten all day. She could make hot chocolate. The stove’s gas. She pours two shots of Chivas in her mug instead.

Windows flex and clatter. The house throbs with her body: she’s the pounding heart in it. Shrubs scritch and slap. Limbs snap. Limbs tear. She thinks of the men from the square, wonders if they crawled into dumpsters and closed the lids.

Somewhere a door slams. Iris blown home? This is Elena’s prayer. In the kitchen, the back screen flaps. When she tries to latch it, a gust rips it from her hands. Hinges shear. Pellets hit her face, icy rain, tiny stones tossed by a tiny fist. The boy, she thinks, he’s out there. Voices roar in the whirlwind, all the lost children rising out of mud and grass.

Is she drunk already? Skinny woman, empty stomach – she tells herself that’s all it is.

Another door bangs below her, the one from garage to basement. Please, God, make it Iris. She stands at the top of the stairs and calls. No answer, only that smell of feral cat.

She takes her bottle to the couch, doesn’t bother with the mug. Candles gutter and flare. The animal follows, marks its territory, sprays its scent. She feels it heave in the leather beneath her thighs and back. Someone’s sewn its torn chest. Someone’s filled its belly with blood and gas.

She drifts. Dreams the creature on top of her. Crushing air from her lungs. Pinching veins in her neck. This beast has a thick hide and six hands. He’s heavy as three men. Feathers slap her face. Then it’s only the boy. Small, hard. The one from the Ave. The one from the square. The child. Little fingers too short to grip her neck. But he has his knife. And he’s so fast.

Then it’s Iris. White face, purple mouth. Iris with her sharp hips. Shaking her wet hair. Iris so close they take the same breath. Iris says, You know why I came back?

She jolts awake. Alone. It’s her own body that makes the couch warm. Her sweat. It’s her own small fist shoved in her mouth. Her own will that keeps her silent.

In the kitchen, a simple click. The refrigerator door opened and closed. Could it be that harmless? Iris willing to eat her food at last? No. Iris drinks coffee with cream. Eats salsa and chips. Once a day. Never here. The one in the kitchen cracks four eggs in a quart of milk, shakes three times, guzzles it. He tears off chunks of sausage with his pointy teeth. The better to eat you, he says.

Please, she thinks, make it quick. She remembers all those forbidden boys – black hair, dirty hands – Mexicans who picked fruit in her father’s orchards; Indians who worked for nobody, who never would, that’s what her father said; almost blue boys who sat on mailboxes, who pretended not to see the girl hiding in her pale skin, who said things she couldn’t understand as she passed, low things, tender threats, murmurs that made her feel flushed and damp, curses that made her want to beg forgiveness. I’ll throttle you. If I ever catch you with a boy like that. So she was with the clean white boys in the field. Drinking rum. And it was dark. And there was no color anywhere. So it was safe. And they were nice boys, sons of her father’s friends, boys she’d known since kindergarten, boys who were going to college next year. So how could she explain their hands on her, the marks they left, fingerprints on soft flesh, green bruises, arms gripped? How could she explain red marks on her neck and breasts? How could she go home and who could she blame and who would her father throttle if she confessed?

Later she thought she made it up. Just a bad dream, a hot wind full of dust. The next night she sat at the dinner table, moving her fork to her mouth, chewing, swallowing, as if eating still made sense.

Where was Mother?

In the bathroom with the door locked, lying in the tub, water so deep she could float.

Where was Little Sister?

In the kitchen getting Daddy another scotch and milk.

Years later little Julie was the one. Just like Elena. High in the parched hills above Yakima. Laughing, drunk. Then she was crying, clawing at the ground.

No one’s ever going to hear her.

No one’s ever going to come.

These sisters keep their silence forever. Each pretending the other doesn’t know.

How did Elena guess? She sat awake all night watching shooting stars flame out. Near dawn, Little Sister climbed in the window down the hall. Elena heard the shower pound and pound; she remembered her own skin, imagined Julie naked, scrubbing herself raw till scalding water ran ice cold.

Tonight Elena lies in another house, safe from her sister’s voice, deaf to words never said out loud: If you knew, why didn’t you help? How many years since Julie climbed in that window? Decades now. How many months since they’ve spoken on the phone? Elena can’t remember, doesn’t want to count. Julie has three ex-husbands and four children lost. The last time she called, Julie said the kids were still in foster care but she’d gotten sober, found God.

This time it’s not her sister sneaking in the window. Not her sister rattling doors in this house.

It’s the boy. She’s sure. Wet dog. The smell in the back seat all along. Yes, you brought him here yourself.

She crawls. She still has this advantage. It’s her house. She knows its obstacles. She scrambles to the stairs, where she can close one more door, slide one more bolt.

She can trap herself. Lie down in the tub. Roll under the bed. Squat in the closet.

She can make herself very small.

She can slip into Geoffrey’s suit and shoes, pretend to be someone else. She can plead for mercy, make bargains, talk to Julie’s God. She can swear she’ll never tell. I forget your face already.

She can say, Take anything you want.

The boy roars with laughter.

He says, Thanks, I will.

His voice fills her lungs like God. He holds all the cards. He has no reason to make deals with stupid girls.

But what does he want with her body? And what will he do with her blood?

This is where she finally goes: into the attic under the eaves, the coldest place, the cobwebbed peak of the house. It’s the last place he’ll look. Birds flap against a tiny window. Pigeons, swallows, gulls. They tap, all beak and claw. She could save them, cover her fist to break a hole. But she’s afraid they’ve gone mad in the storm. Afraid they’ll peck her apart.

There’s a trunk half full of sweaters where she lies down, deep in the smell of cedar, wrapped in Mother’s frayed quilt.

She hopes the boy finds the bottle of Chivas by the couch and drinks it all. She hopes he finds Geoffrey’s Goldschläger, twenty-four-karat flakes swirling in schnapps. She dreams veins full of metal, heart clogged with gold. She imagines morning, finding the boy curled on the floor, kneeling beside him, tying him with twine and scarves. She’ll wait for him to wake. She’ll say, Let me take you home.

The house erupts. The boy hears this thought. Home. His voice is exploding glass, a tree limb torn.

He says, I had a mother once, stupid as you are now.

The boy says, I have names, things people call me, words my mother gave me – my father’s name, as if she always planned to throw me out.

Boys call me one thing.

Girls call me another.

But in my head I say these names: Ice, Mud, River.

I have enemies: the kid who owned this jacket, the rain tonight, my own memory.

Don’t touch me when I’m sleeping.

I hate fingers in my hair, fat women, the smell of baby powder.

I have a knife inside a secret pocket.

Surprise me and I’ll kill you.

I need gloves, a blanket, a place to lie down, a hole to hide me.

I don’t like birds. They scare me. All that noise. Their hunger. They remind me that I’m hungry.

I don’t like dogs. They make me bark. They make me want to bite them.

I killed a cat once. Not on purpose. But later I wasn’t sorry. It startled me, my hands around it, the way it twitched, the way it stopped twitching.

Mostly I hate pigeons, rats with wings – and squirrels, rats with bushy tails.

When I’m alone, I hate the sound in my own veins, the way it fills the room, like God whispering.

I love the dark, the sewer, the closet – all the places I’m invisible.

I love the water when it’s deep and wants to drown me.

I love the bottle in my hand, green glass, jagged edges. I love my cut palms, warm blood when it turns thick as pudding.

I love the bridge when the wind is cold and I’m almost jumping.

I love your house, the way locks burst and doors open.

I love the smell of rum and chocolate, my sticky fingers.

I love these walls so much I leave my handprints.

Am I really here?

I am if you believe it.

I love the way I scare you, the way my heart becomes your heart, the way our pulse surges.

The boy cries at every door, Mother. Elena remembers Iris shut in the upstairs bedroom. Iris wailing. She remembers hiding in the basement, in the bathroom, with the water drumming.

So I wouldn’t hear her.

She was afraid of her own daughter, two months old, Iris whimpering. She was afraid of tiny arms and fragile fingers. Afraid of herself, what she might do to stop this squalling.

She locked all the doors between them.

The boy howls. He knows this. He says, Put your hand on my head, feel how flat the back is.

Yes, she understands. If you leave a child long enough, the soft bones of the skull will flatten.

He says, No wonder we hate you.

Elena whispers, But that didn’t happen. Elena says, Iris has a perfect head, a lovely curve – I didn’t hurt her.

The boy laughs. The boy says, You think I don’t know that?

The boy says, You think I haven’t touched her?

He says, She lived in the jungle eight days last summer. I remember her voice. She’s sweet, your Iris. But mostly it’s her throat I remember. So white I wanted to snap it. I wanted to lie down beside her with my eyes closed. I wanted to rub naked against her until her skin was sore and red and mine was healed.

Why should I be me? Why should she be Iris?

One night she must have heard me. My thoughts. She must have dreamed the words inside me. The next day she disappeared. Came home. To you. To this house. Not because she loves you. Only because I scare her. She’ll get over that. Don’t think that you can keep her.

The boy says, She told us where you live, how easy it would be to rob you. He says, When I saw you on the Ave. that day, I knew we were meant to be together.

Elena wants to tell the boy, Everybody suffers. Wants to say that children who live in cars and children who live in castles sit awake all night watching stars, wondering why meteors don’t set the earth on fire. Children everywhere wonder why their mothers refuse to answer. Children lie in the grass, waiting for fathers who never come to save them.

The boy is very practical. The boy says, You sleep in the car. I’ll sleep in the castle. He says, You eat from the dumpster. I’ll eat your salmon and raspberries. He says, I’ll lie under the down comforter. You can stuff your pants with newspaper.

He says, Maybe you’re right. He says, Maybe I’ll still suffer. He says, I’m willing to try it.

He hasn’t been this warm in years. He says, I think I’d like to die here. He says, We die every night in the jungle. Last week it was a migrant. One of those fools who forgot to go south for the winter. He ended up with us instead, under the freeway, in a house made of sticks and cardboard. He was hacking yellow phlegm and bleeding from his asshole. Maybe you’re right. When it comes to this, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the car or in the castle. On the white bed or the cold vinyl. But if I had my choice, I’d stay in your house forever.

We didn’t let him die in the dirt. We made a bed of leaves, wrapped our hands in rags to lift him. Someone covered him with a silver blanket. Our astronaut.

He asked us to find the sin-eater. Who knows how many of us there are? Ten thousand in this city? But we found her, the one he wanted, shriveled-up old spook of a woman. She came and sat beside him. Ate everything we brought her – boiled cat, raw fish, roasted squirrel. She swelled and swelled. Choked down his evil. Drank gallons of water. Belched and farted. She chewed till her eyes rolled and she toppled over. We thought his sins had killed her. All that meat, his poison. She slept two days. Foul. We had to tie shirts over our noses. The man burned. Riding that horse. No one could stop him. But his body wanted to stay with us. It breathed and bled. It snorted. Once its eyes opened.

On the third day, the sin-eater woke. Small again. Her withered self. Wind blew through the stick house. Rain washed us. We smelled like the ocean, salt and seaweed. We were clean, in a way, as clean as we can be. Our astronaut was wet and cool. His blanket shimmered like liquid silver. We wrapped it around him. A girl with little hands sewed it shut with tiny stitches.

That night we carried him to the highway and left him on the shoulder. We were too tired to dig a hole. And there are too many of us to bury. We could dig all day every day, turn this jungle to a graveyard.

If you leave a dead man on the road, someone always takes him.

He disappeared at daybreak.

We have this kind of magic.

When it was dark again, the silver blanket burst above me. A billion stars exploded. I was afraid. I thought it was his body breaking. If blood splattered in my eyes and mouth, I’d be the next one dying. But there were only stars and the black sky between them.

The boy is very tired. Too tired to keep talking. He whispers his last words to Elena. He says, Every night ends if you live through it.

This night does end. The rain is soft now. Elena climbs out of the trunk. She’s not scared. She knows the boy has vanished.

Room by room, she’ll find everything he’s left her.

In her bed, she’ll find his imprint. Everywhere he’s been, he’s carved a hole, a space for her to enter. Yes, it’s true, when she touches the spot where his head lay on her pillow, she knows how flat his skull is. Between the sheets, she feels his short legs and curved clavicle, the three places where his arm was broken.

In the bathroom, she finds specks of blood in the sink, knows he tried to brush his teeth. His teeth are stained, his gums infected. He defines himself by absence, by what he’s taken: three bars of soap, toothpaste and toothbrush, a box of Band-Aids. He’s left a ring of scum in the tub, two wet towels, a damp bathmat. She finds blood here too. The boy scraped his flesh this hard and still felt filthy.

On the kitchen counter, she finds four eggshells, spilled milk, the empty carton. He’s taken a tin of cashews and a box of powdered chocolate.

In the dining room, she finds shattered glasses, her favorite ones, hand-blown in Murano. She sees the broken window. No birds have flown inside her house, but in the shards she hears trapped cries and torn wings quivering.

The boy’s pulled ivory creatures from the closet: an otter swallowing a lynx, a wolf mounting a caribou. Strange couplings. He has no use for these, and so he leaves them.

She follows him downstairs, his trail of sticky handprints. This is where he’s strongest, where he was in the beginning and where he was in the end. Before he came upstairs, he must have lain on Iris’s bed with his shoes on. He changed his clothes here. He’s left his dirty pants, his hooded sweatshirt. Elena imagines what he’s wearing now. Iris’s ripped jeans, Geoffrey’s leather jacket. He has her black alpaca sweater. She remembers an open drawer upstairs, thinks he took a pair of stockings. Practical boy. Will he wear them under the jeans, stay warm this winter? No, he’d never do that. He’ll pull one leg of her pantyhose over his face to smash his nose and lips flat. No one will recognize him. Except Elena. Yes, she thinks, I know the curved bones of your shoulders. The silt under your nails. I know the texture of your hair between my fingers. I know you as I know my own child, as I know myself, as I know my sister.

She takes his little pile of clothes to the trash can. The rain is cold, a fine drizzle. She smells split wood, fresh sap, grass shredded. Out here there’s no scent of boy to follow.

She tugs the sheets and comforter from Iris’s bed. When the electricity comes back on, she’ll wash them. She wipes fingerprints from the wall, throws out eggshells. Scours sink and bathtub. Smoothes pillowcases. She erases him. She has to. No one would understand. No one would believe her. Just a drunk woman throwing her own glasses. A scared, silly woman hiding in the attic. She presses her face to the pillow, wondering how many days she’ll breathe him.

This morning her husband will come home and find her weeping. She won’t explain this.

Tonight her daughter will appear, as if by magic. Thin, wet Iris. Slender stalk of her body in dark clothes, white bloom of her face. Iris in the doorway. Lighting a cigarette. Iris saying, Mind if I smoke here?

Tonight Elena will lie down beside her husband. If he touches thigh or cheek, she’ll tell him she’s exhausted. When he drops off at last, she’ll go down the basement stairs to watch her daughter. She’ll stay almost an hour, hoping Iris won’t wake and see her. Hoping Iris won’t say, What are you doing?

Later she’ll sit beside an open window to watch the rain, knowing that behind those clouds, every star is falling.

All this happens.

She tries to see the boy in her mind. Tries to imagine his small body in Geoffrey’s jacket. She wonders if her stockings are still in his pocket. She wonders where he is tonight and if she’ll ever find him.

The rain has a voice. The rain answers. This rain says, I have a body like yours and like your mother’s. I have a body like your daughter’s. I have a body. It’s the boy’s, and it’s your sister’s. They’ve stepped between the raindrops. They flow away. They’re mostly water.