It’s too late to knock, Clare said.
She made me remember our first theft, Adele’s car, all the windows down, made me see her at fifteen, myself at ten. We weren’t running away: we were feeling the wind. We drove north, out of the dusty August day into the surprising twilight. I remember the blue of that sky, dark and brilliant, dense, like liquid, cool on our skin. And then ahead of us, glowing in a field, we saw a carnival tent, lit from inside.
Freaks, we thought, and we wanted to see, imagined we’d find the midget sisters, thirty-three inches high; the two-headed pig; the three-hundred-pound calf.
We wanted to see Don Juan the Dwarf, that silk robe, that black mustache. We wanted to buy his kisses for dimes. We wanted him to touch our faces with his stubby hands.
We wanted the tattooed woman to open her shirt. Pink-eyed albino lady. We wanted her to show us the birds of paradise on her old white chest.
We wanted to go into the final room, the draped booth at the far corner of the tent, we wanted to pay our extra dollar to see the babies in their jars: the one with half a brain and the twins joined hip to chest. We wanted to see our own faces reflected in that glass, to know our own bodies, revealed like this.
We wanted freaks, the strange thrill of them.
But this is what we found instead: ordinary cripples, a man in a violet robe promising Jesus would heal them.
We found children in wheelchairs. We saw their trembling limbs.
We saw a bald girl in a yellow dress.
We saw two boys with withered bodies and huge heads.
We saw all the mothers on their knees. We thought their cries would lift this tent.
Busted driving home. Adele knew who had the car but turned us in. That’s why I left, Clare said.
I’m waiting for you on the road.
You could be anyone: a woman with a blond child, or the man in the blue truck come back. You could be the one who wants me dead. We meet at last.
I’m not trying to go home. I’m heading north instead.
Clare’s tired. Clare’s not talking now. If you’re dangerous, I don’t think she’ll tell me.
I see swirling snow, pink light between bare trees, your car in the distance, moving fast. I speak out loud to hear myself. Clare’s gone, I say. But when you spot me, when you swerve and stop, she surprises me. She says, Go, little sister, get in.
She whispers, Yes, this is the one.
I don’t know what she means.
If you ask me where I want to go, I’ll tell you this: Take me out of the snow. Take me to a tent in a field. Make it summer. Make the sky too blue. Make the wind blow. Let me stand here with all the crippled children. Give me twisted bones and metal braces. Give me crutches so I can walk. Let my mother fall down weeping, begging the man in violet robes to make me whole.
THE SNOW THIEF
MY FATHER FLED without waking. Snow fell. The ghost of an elk drifted between trees. Mother called that November morning. Gone, she said, as if he might be missing. He was sixty-nine, still quick and wiry, a tow-truck driver who cruised county roads rescuing women like me.
A single vessel ruptures; blood billows in the brain. That fast. Impossible to believe. Eleven years since he’d caught me with his friend Jack Fetters in the back seat. No one could blame his bursting artery on me. No one except my father himself. He filled my one-room flat on Water Street. I smelled smoke in damp wool, saw the shadow of his hand pass close to my face.
Simply dead. How could this be? He’d wounded the elk at dawn, tracked it for miles down the ravine. Near dark, the bull became an owl and flew away.
Lungs freeze. Hearts fail. It’s easy. I know it happens everywhere, hundreds of times a day, to daughters much younger than I was then. Still, each one leaves a mystery.
As my father slipped into bed that night, he said, My shoulder hurts. Could you rub me?
And Mother whispered, I’m too sleepy.
It drove her mad. Over and over she said the same thing: I was going to rub his shoulder in the morning.
I thought we’d lose her. She kept asking, How could I sleep with your father dead beside me? I remember how suddenly she shrank, how nothing she ate stayed with her. My brother wanted to put her away. A home, Wayne said, for her own safety.
One night we found all her windows open, the back door flapping. We caught her three miles up the highway. She stood in the middle of the road, as if she’d felt us coming and had paused to wait. Our headlights blasted through worn cloth, revealed small drooping breasts and tense legs, bare feet too cold to bleed. She wore only her tattered nightgown. No underpants beneath it. Nothing.
She wouldn’t ride in the truck. I gave her my coat and boots. I wore Wayne’s. He had to drive in stocking feet. Mother and I walked together, silent the whole way. I held her arm to keep her steady. But this is the truth: she was the one to steady me. It made sense, this cold — a kind of prayer, this ceaseless walking.
When we got home, she let me wash her feet. I told her she was lucky, no frostbite, and she said, Lucky?
Then she slept, fifty-six hours straight.
The doctor said, She needs this. She’s healing.
I washed her whole body. She hadn’t bathed for twelve days. My mother, that smell! Air too thick to breathe, tight as skin around me.
She woke wanting sausages and steak. Eggs fried in bacon grease. A can of hash with corned beef. She ate like this for days and days, stayed skinny all the same. It’s your father, she said. He’s hungry.
He took her piece by piece. For thirteen years my mother stumbled in tracks she couldn’t see. Every year another stroke left another tiny hole in her brain. I thought of it this way, saw our father standing at the edge of the pines, his gun raised. He was firing at Mother; but it was dusk, and since he was dead, his aim was unsteady. Each time he hit, she staggered toward him. He was a proud man, even now. It was his way of calling.
In the end, he defeated himself. All those scars left spaces empty. She forgot why she’d gone to the woods and who she wanted to find there. She loved only her nurse, and almost forgot my father, and almost forgot my brother and me.
I caught the pretty boy smoothing her sheet. Thin as an angel, this Rafael, so graceful he seemed to be dancing. He held her wrist to feel the pulse. He checked her IV. He said, What a beautiful way to eat.
He loved her too. How can anyone explain? He wasn’t afraid of burned thighs or skin peeling. He touched her feathery hair, sparse and fine as wet down on one of the unborn chicks my brother kept in jars of formaldehyde the year he was fourteen. Specimens, he called them, his eighth-grade science project. Every two days he cracked another egg to examine the fetus. I hated myself, remembering this, seeing my own mother curl up like one of these. But there they were, those jars of yellow fluid, those creatures floating.
I stroked her arm to make her wake.
What do you want now? she said.
To say goodnight.
Not goodbye?
Not yet.
It’s not up to you, she said. She was seventy-seven years old, seventy-three pounds the last time anyone checked.
What did I want?
I wanted her big again. Tall as my father. Wide in the hips.