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.
NECESSARY ANGELS
DORA’S DISAPPEARED AGAIN. I see her lying in the field, in the abandoned refrigerator. She’s not sleeping and she’s not dead: she’s between these places. And though I’m afraid for her even now, from this distance of years I can tell you Dora Stone is going to live.
The first time it happened, she was five years old, thirty-six pounds. While Mother dozed in the shade of her striped umbrella, Dora wandered up the beach, into the cool waves. She felt sand shifting under her feet, her small body sinking in the tug of an undertow. One man up the shore was close enough to save her. One fat white man burned red seemed to stare. But he didn’t come. Was he blind behind his glasses, or was he curious, wanting to see what the child might do?
She wasn’t that deep really. She wasn’t going to drown. She was her own voice whispering in her own ear, Just walk out. Mother found her, safe and dry, so Lily’s fury, stripped of fear, was pure, and the slaps were quick and hard, familiar — Dora knew how to let them falclass="underline" no crying, no ducking. The sting went away soon enough, and Mommy was sorry in the dark; Mommy came to Dora’s room and lay down beside her in the blue bed. Mommy cried and held Dora, stroked her precious body, touched arm and neck and thigh as if to be sure the child was all there. She said, What would Mommy do if she lost you?
These are the bodies Lily’s lost already: the husband with another wife and two sons; the mother shrinking in the bed, wrinkling into the sheets till she was gone; the half-man down the hall, her father, lost; her own unknown self. She’s not fat but blurred, lost in her body: drooping breasts and buttocks, spread white belly — lily-white Lily Stone, not a flower now though her skin is still petal soft and that pale, that easily bruised. Don’t touch Mommy too hard, don’t hug her too close, but she can touch you where and how she wants, can slap your head on the beach or swat your butt, can come to your room and lie beside you in your little bed, her breath wine sweet, her body a weight and heat that fills your room till you blur too, into her, precious baby, the place that is yourself and not yourself has disappeared, but you don’t look at her here, and she’s come to this room so many times you’re not scared — why would you be scared of your own mother, who only wants to lie this close? Yes, it’s hot, but you’re used to that, so you let her sleep and do not tell her of waves or undertow, do not speak of sand, though you feel them in your body now, in your body that remembers everything, the pull and lick, the ground beneath you slipping. You do not speak of the burning man. He’s yours. You keep these places to go alone: the water, the blind man’s eyes, the stranger’s hands.
The next time, Dora’s six, tied in the closet, forgotten by twelve-year-old Max, her cousin and best friend, who has used his favorite knot, the Lazarus loop, so called because a person has roughly the same chance of escaping it as she has of rising from the dead.
It will happen again. Dora’s bike is in the reeds by the canal. But eight-year-old Dora is gone. Or she’s eleven, drunk on beer with Max, who is no longer allowed in their grandfather’s house. They dance in the back of the truck, radio blaring, doors flung open, yellow light spilling into the swamp. The man in the song says he’s a razor he’s a rifle he’s the water and Max says, You’re dangerous, girl. Hours later, in the still dark, Dora wakes groggy and mystified on her own front lawn.
In the morning she’ll learn of the stolen truck, Max’s escape from the Alpena School for Boys, a string of gas stations robbed from Michigan to Florida and one attendant shot in the hand, So if you know, little girl, you better tell us where. Armed and dangerous, sweet tender Max, shaved almost bald — Max, whose dirty fingers snarled your long hair when he pulled you close. You should have known.