It is over: Jason is back to cracking nuts, and there is only the ghost-warmth of his hand on her chest. Bettina is still singing her little tale, tucking the turkey fat over the herbed flesh as if it were a coverlet. Jaime picks up a celery stalk and dices it.
This is a game, Jaime knows, but only Jason understands the rules. She believes the goal is to see how far he can go before Jaime squeals. For a month or so he has been catching her, squeezing her hips, letting his hand brush her ass in passing. A few nights ago, he caught her in the corridor on her way to the bathroom and pressed his body against hers hard and when his voice hissed in her ears for hours afterward, she didn’t know if she felt pleasure or alarm. She dices, she does not look at Bettina or Jason. She waits to know what she wants.
LILY WATCHES HER grandmother from under the silken fringe of the table. The old woman is crumpled into a wheelchair against the window; behind her the winter sun sets over the city. She has a cigarette in one hand, a martini in the other; once in a while she puts down the martini to gasp into her oxygen mask. She never, Lily notices, puts down the cigarette.
She’s like an old witch in your mom’s stories, says Sammy in Lily’s ear. Sammy is spiteful and bad, and Lily often has to discipline her because no one else can.
Shut up, Sammy, she says. The grandmother turns her head and sees Lily.
Come out of there, child, she snaps. Who’s that you’re talking to?
Lily worms out slowly, her hands floured with dust. Just Sammy, she says. Nobody. She can see herself now reflected in the glass beyond her grandmother’s head: pale and plump, her hair stringy, her red-framed glasses enormous on her face. At least she’s not like Sammy, who’s fat and moist and googly-eyed, like a frog.
The grandmother sighs, rattling, and says, You with your everlasting imaginary friend. And seeing Lily’s hand digging at her nostril, more sharply: Don’t pick your nose.
Maria moves out in the hallway, humming. She went all the way to the West Side to pick Lily up at school that afternoon. The girl had been sitting in the principal’s office for hours. Lily’s chest had grown tighter and tighter until at last her bladder exploded and she wet herself. Lily often does. She has severe anxiety issues, Dr. Kramer says. Her mother calls her Our Lily of the Furrowed Brow, and at school, the kids are mean and call her Lily-Wet-Butt. But today Maria only smiled at Lily with her potato-plain face, and helped wash the girl off. Maria is like that. She puts out two plates when it’s snacktime and always asks about Sammy’s health. Even Sammy likes Maria and Sammy likes nobody.
She’s real, says Lily to her grandmother now. Sammy’s real. She considers for a minute and says, But she’s ugly and dumb so you probably don’t want to see her anyways.
Stop clutching yourself, says the grandmother sharply. Do you have to urinate?
No, lies Lily, and then, feeling the old tightness in her chest, she stretches the neck of her shirt above her nose and down three times. All her shirts are floppy at the neck because of it. Dr. Kramer says she should do whatever helps. Sammy unfurls her long tongue into the grandmother’s martini, and Lily frowns: she’s going to have to punish Sammy for that later.
A dense wave passes over her, and Lily is suddenly tired. All she wants is home. To finish her homework, to see her dad, who scoops her up when he comes home and reads or talks to her until she sleeps. Routine. She feels a sharp stab of sorrow in her gut. When am I going home? she asks.
The grandmother says, I don’t know.
Lily blinks, makes a little squeak. Where are my parents? she says. She feels the pressure descending on her, fast. It’s bad, and Sammy draws near to watch, breathing her moist breath in Lily’s face.
We’re still trying to figure that one out, the grandmother says.
But seeing the way Lily’s face changes, seeing her slow collapse, she hurriedly croaks out, Maria, Maria, Maria as loudly as she can until, at last, Maria comes running.
KEY WEST, HYMN OF JOY: from the dark shadows of the room the girl emerges, a pale fish rising from the deep. Howie watches from the bed, heart throbbing in his throat, his own body struck to water. Hers is slim, smooth, a length of muslin, a sheet of music. Knees in-turned, gap in her teeth, the green moth tattoo on her buttock, turned away just now so he can only imagine it. Knowing it is there gives him such a pang, the last trace of her origins, the sad rundown farmhouse smelling of cat piss and mushrooms that he has imagined in full, though she has said nothing at all about where she is from. There is a part of him who longs for just this dirt in her. She is unlike anybody he’s ever known.
Her white body moves, and moves him. She’s just past adolescence, just a girl, young enough to be his daughter. Briefly there flashes in his mind his daughter’s face, such a fierce, lost thing, tiny. He has to focus on the lovely girl before him to regain his desire.
Outside, the lime-flavored sunlight tries to peer at them through the plantation shutters: in the sky, the birds rill the world alive. Above, the sun beats down on the island and urges the sea to singing.
Now that sweet face nearing, now those bitten lips, now the eye clear and blue as mint, that tender hollow in her collar. The girl, so young, smiles down at him. Howie reaches for her. At last, he forgets himself.
THE WOMAN IS IN the shower when the punk girl arrives in the morning. As she comes back into the cold room, bringing a cloud of steam with her, she finds the girl furiously pulling up the bedspread, her eyes red-rimmed. The woman cannot help herself: she touches the girl’s face and feels the soft childish skin, her warmth. There is something familiar about the loose mouth, the way it leaps and stretches wormlike with the girl’s emotions. Vulnerable is the word: and she doesn’t realize she’s said it aloud until the girl turns and flees, the laundry bunched in her arms.
The tray has no gifts on it this morning, which disturbs the woman most of all.
By the window later, as the sun sizzles out in the wet treetops, she falls asleep. When she wakes, there is the last fog of a story in her head — she’d seen it somewhere, or heard it. Television, book, movie, she doesn’t know where it came from. There was a woman, tall and beautifuclass="underline" this she knows, though she couldn’t see the woman clearly. A letter plucked from a heap of mail, without return address or signature, a photograph falling from it, a menace of flesh. And, somehow connected, a night, a pond rimmed by dark trees, headlights spinning the fog, a car sunk to its bumper in the water.
She considers this for a minute, but there is danger there, and she pushes it safely away.
Now, as she awaits the knock on the door, the hot early supper on the tray, a voice in her mind rises up, sly and dark, an old woman’s voice. It says: Tabitha. It says: Sudden Pond.
The woman shivers: the radiator clucks out its warmth. Although she presses her hands against it, although she paces, counting her steps so she won’t think, she can’t get warm.
IT IS LATE. Bettina is in the kitchen popping popcorn over the stove; Jason is out, somewhere; Jaime’s hair is still wet from her second shower of the day and she is waiting for Roman Holiday on television. There is something tragic about Hepburn even when she’s happy. As if the princess knows that the one measly day in which she gets to eat gelato and smash a guitar over a secret policeman’s head and swoon into Peck’s arms will never be enough to compensate for her lonely life as a royal.