Irene sat on the bottom of the pool cross-legged. She was training herself to hold her breath as long as the Native Americans whose bones Myra claimed to have found. From under the water all the plastic backs of all of the yellow and orange chairs looked like the colorful plastic flags rippling from strings on the gas station islands where she and George had stopped on their way here. Irene was not surprised when things looked like other things. She had seen George use a coffee table for a seat, a bed for a table, a jacket for a pillow. She had seen Myra use her hand as a broom to sweep crumbs and one of George’s shirts as a cape to pretend to fly away out of the prison that was actually their apartment.
When they crossed the border into Tennessee, George had pointed out into the world with his finger, back toward Virginia. “You were born on an island off that coast,” he said. Irene was practicing rolling the car window down with her toes, but she listened carefully to this story told all her life. She took the time, though, to admire the way her leg looked, not spread out on the seat but bent gracefully like a woman’s.
“Surrounded by water on all sides,” her father said, dreamy, like the rest of the ride in the car with Irene dozing off and then waking up in different states. He was still pointing, and the story of the island where she was born meant even more with the eye of a dead dog, legs straight up in the air on the side of the road, staring at Irene. “Oh no,” George said. “Poor dog,” as if Irene couldn’t see for herself. The dog’s eye was like the eyes of dead fish she’d seen in towns by water, staring cold but curious, asking a question: What are you doing alive with me dead on the side of the road? The stiff, dead dog’s eye staring seemed like a sign.
Irene rose quickly to the pool’s surface, sputtering water.
“Careful there,” her father said.
“I am being careful,” Irene protested. She hated it when he acted like a parent, when he pretended not to notice how well she took care of herself, causing no trouble.
“This is a sign,” Myra had told Irene one day as they stood on the lip of the park. George had told Myra not to go into the park with the monument that housed the prison ship martyrs’ dead bones, but there it was, a sign in the form of a chewed dog’s bone right at their feet. Irene saw the logic too. “This means we are allowed to enter,” Myra said. And they did, walking slowly, swinging their feet in circles — like the metal detectors Irene saw the old men use sometimes — slowly so they could pick up any vibrations from buried bones deep underground. “Even after you die,” Myra told her, “your bones vibrate from all the living they’ve absorbed over the years.”
When the sun began to disappear behind the mountains, Irene wrapped a towel turbanlike around her head and walked dripping toward the stairs to the room.
“It’s her majesty, the Queen of Sheba,” George called down. He’d since moved upstairs to the balcony off their room, where he could put his feet up on a table in the shade and use the bathroom if he needed.
Irene rolled her eyes, but she was glad he was paying attention, glad that they had each other. She realized then how much he needed her but turned her thoughts quickly instead to the motel magic. While she was swimming, the sheets on the twin beds had been replaced with new ones, the top cover turned down; the glass ashtray where her father discarded his pistachio shells replaced by a new, clean one; the thrown-around clothes stacked in a pile on the chair; and clean-smelling towels hung where the rumpled, pool-soaked ones had been.
When they’d first walked into the motel room so neat and orderly — especially compared to their Brooklyn home piled high with Myra’s books on Brooklyn’s hidden graveyards and the Bible she hid whenever George came home — Irene couldn’t believe it. “I can’t believe that this is all ours,” she said. “I can’t believe they give you this.”
“They’re not giving it to you,” George said, but Irene saw the way George looked at the room, saw that he saw it too, the opportunity for peace. When she saw the Bible on top of the bedside table that separated the two beds, she hid it in the drawer. It had been only recently, after Myra had left her job as a secretary at a hospital—“too many almost-bones”—and in secret, when George was in the city working as many jobs as he could as a copy editor to support them now that Myra was no longer working, that Myra had started reading to Irene from the parts of the Bible that scared Irene because they made Myra red in the face. These parts made her laugh instead of cry, which didn’t seem very cleansing to Irene.
His eyes are as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters, washed with milk, and fitly set.
His cheeks are sweet as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers: his lips like lilies, dropping sweet smelling myrrh.
Her hand slipped under her robe to rest over one breast, Myra flushed, and Irene imagined she was talking about George, but then Myra would turn to her as if the words were meant for Irene herself.
We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she will be spoken for?
“I’m your daughter,” Irene would remind Myra, and Myra would stop laughing for a moment to consider this.
After they’d put their bags down, George had tousled Irene’s hair and walked out on the balcony to stare at the pool. When Irene walked up beside him, though, she saw he wasn’t looking at the pool at all. He stared far out into space, to a place in the sky beyond even the mountains, a place that Irene couldn’t locate, not yet visible to her child’s eye.
The first night Irene became suddenly shy while undressing, even with George on the porch staring out. There they were, just as she’d sometimes wished, just the two of them without Myra. Irene wondered if she’d made this come true. She shook her head, whipping her face with her hair, shaking out the thought. Had she wished for this so hard that she’d made Myra disappear? But when she asked George the night they left whether she should run back inside to wake Myra up to say good-bye, George assured her that Myra needed to sleep. Myra had wandered the house every night for a week, not sleeping, not eating because she said food crowded her mouth. Her mother needed her sleep, Irene told herself the way George had told her. Irene was just following instructions. She was a child, after all. She should do what her father told her.
“Ready for dinner?” George appeared from off the porch like a ghost in a story Myra had read to Irene recently. “Are you talking to yourself, little one?” And Irene realized she’d been standing in her bathing suit, arguing with herself out loud in the mirror.
“Just practicing a play I made up,” Irene said. She knew how to make herself seem appropriately childlike. She wished that it were true.
“Maybe you’ll perform it for Clara after dinner,” George said. “Meet you downstairs, okay?”
“Okay.” Irene waited until the door closed behind her father to give herself a solid talking-to in the mirror, one that would show she was different from her mother shaking the dog bone at herself. “I’m telling my bones to stay in my body,” she’d told Irene when, the night before Irene and George left on their trip, Irene had woken to find Myra in front of Irene’s mirror decorated with pictures of Irene’s friends, who no longer came over to the apartment. “Stay in there, bones. Hang onto that flesh. Don’t abandon the prison ship. The soldiers are coming to save you.” Irene heard them in the hall afterward — George telling Myra she was scaring Irene, scaring him, scaring her doctor, whom she refused to see like the medicine she refused to take, like the hospital she ran away from because it was full of bones, bones with no flesh, skeletons walking around, bossing her around with their rattling bones as if she couldn’t see that all they wanted was to steal her flesh, use it for their own. “Shh,” George said, “shh, honey. Come to bed, my sweet girl.”