“This heat can make a person crazy if you don’t get enough to drink.”
Rafe shook his head. This had nothing to do with the heat. As he walked away I imagined his shirt sleeves hung empty, flapping in the hot wind.
“That poor boy,” Mom said, pouring the lemonade. “I had no idea.”
Nina grunted and slumped down on the swing. She leaned back. Before I’d finished my drink, her lips fluttered and she snored like an old man.
“It’s all those cigarettes,” Mom said. “I don’t think that girl can breathe right anymore.”
I didn’t care if she could breathe or not. I thought there was something more seriously wrong with her than too much smoke if she could fall asleep after a man told her he felt as if he had no arms. A man with no arms can’t hold a woman. A man with no arms can’t break his fall.
That night Daddy came downstairs for dinner — the first meal he’d had at the table since the night of the fire. He even dressed himself, but his pants had grown baggy and he had to cinch his belt up two notches. His blond hair was beautiful, combed back, trimmed perfectly over his big ears, delicately curved on the neck. Mother set an extra place for him and acted as if this were nothing unusual. Nina sat beside Daddy. She let him hold her hand while he said grace, the old grace that he hadn’t said since we were children: “Father, we thank thee for these mercies.…”
Arlen showed up just as we finished supper. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said. “Lazarus has risen. A walking miracle. No, I stand corrected, a sitting miracle.” She cackled, and I thought this might send my father skittering back up the stairs to hide in his room for another three weeks, but Nina truly had worked a miracle.
“How are you, Arlen?” Dad said, as if he’d seen her just yesterday.
“Better than you. You look like a starved rat.”
“How’re Les and the kids?” Dad said, not taking the bait.
“Fine, they’re fine.” For once Arlen was short on words.
Nina said, “What have you got there, Arlen?”
“Oh, this. I almost forgot. I made pies today, apple. Thought you might like one.”
“Course we would,” said Nina.
I could see it now. Nina would wolf down half the pie and fall asleep with her head on the kitchen table.
That’s just how it happened too, except that she didn’t eat quite half the pie because Daddy was chewing even faster than she could. Later he shuffled out to the porch. Weeks in bed had made him lame; he’d spend a month shaking old age out of his legs. He said he smelled the wind changing. We were in for a cool night. But in the kitchen where Mom and I cleared dishes around the sleeping girl, the air was close and hot.
I heard the lone coo of an owl. It reminded me of the old days when there were always boys whistling in the grass. But tonight’s cries went unanswered; the girl slept, the food in her stomach heavy as a drug, a drug that kept her safe from the story a boy with no arms wanted to tell.
28
MOM AND I sat on the back steps in the dark. My father was right: the wind was changing, blowing the stars out of the night, leaving the sky heavy with yellow fog. In the kitchen, Nina cried out. I ran inside and flicked on the light. She jerked straight up in her seat as if to pretend she hadn’t been out cold for the past three hours. We heard Daddy limping up the stairs, on his way to bed.
“I guess he’s better,” Nina said.
Mom was right behind me. “Because of you,” she said.
“All I did was be alive.”
“That’s no small thing.”
Nina stretched her arms over her head. “Is there any more of that pie?”
“Your father finished it.” Mom reached for Nina’s hand, but Nina stood up to shake off sleep and the dream that had made her yell.
“I hope you can forgive him,” Mom said.
“For eating the pie?”
“For what he did before.”
“You mean for telling me he never wanted to see my face again? You mean for nearly breaking my jaw? You mean for calling me a piece of trash and a worthless slut and no daughter of his from that day forward?”
Mom nodded, ashamed, as if they were her words, not my father’s.
“Hell,” Nina said, “that was nothing. I don’t blame him. I could have let him cool down for a month or two and shown up on your doorstep. With my belly the way it was, he never would have hit me. I chose my life. Nobody ruined me and nobody’s gonna save me, either. Shit, I bet Rafe Carson blames his father for wrecking his life, making him run away. But Rafe didn’t have to steal no fifty dollars. He could have earned it in a week. He was looking for an easy way and you can see where it got him.”
“What did happen after you left here?” Mom said.
Nina hummed a snatch of song. “I think it’s cooler tonight,” she said. “Smells like rain.” She twirled on her toes. “Wouldn’t that be something? Rain. Now, that would be a miracle.”
“Please,” Mom said, “tell me.”
Nina leaned against the stove, sighing like a girl who’d been dancing all night. “Don’t make me think of all that now.”
“But you’ll leave—”
“Yes, in the morning.”
“—and I won’t know anything about you. You’ve been wandering around in my head for five years, Nina, like some dead girl who can’t rest.”
Nina fell into her chair. “I’m not dead, Mama, but sometimes I’m afraid to lie down. I can’t sleep in a bed without it getting narrow in my dreams, without a lid slamming shut on me. I can’t hear a sound — my ears are full of water. I see Jesse. Remember how white he was? Like he didn’t have any blood.” She held out her hands, exposing the underside of her forearms. “Look at me,” she said. “Look how pale I am.” And it was true. That skin was as white as the underside of a fish.
The girl in the airplane pressed her face up to the glass, stunned and silent, awed by her own death. Even Myron Evans who chose his time must have been startled when it finally happened. He didn’t know death would be a hard slap, a boot in the back, knocking him off the chair — no, he was hoping death had arms to hold him, fingers to smooth his hair, lips to kiss his eyes closed, good-night for the last time.
Nina put her head down on the table. “No,” Mom said, shaking her, “you can’t sleep now. You have to tell me.”
“Tell you what?” She sounded groggy already. She was afraid of her dreams, and still she longed for them.
“What happened to Billy? What happened to the baby?”
“Oh that, that was so long ago.” She looked around the room as if she expected someone to walk in the door and tell the story for her. “Lizzie,” she said, “could you make your old sister some tea?” I nodded and she smiled at me as if I’d just done her a great kindness. Her gratitude mocked me. All these days I’d been wishing she would go away and leave me with my visions of my sister, and the only thing she wanted from me was a cup of tea.
“Why did you go with that boy?”
“He touched me right.”
“That’s no reason.”
“It was to me. The boys before Billy made me feel like a heap of damp ground. They couldn’t wait to get their hands under my clothes, but I could have been anybody in the dark — I could have been a pig tied down tight for all they cared. Not Billy. He had a way with his hands. Once a wild canary landed in his palm, and his fingers closed around her so slow that she was stunned and didn’t try to fly away. He called me his yellow bird. He said my heart whispered to his hand. He said if I left with him, he’d fill my house with birds — owls to coo us to sleep, peacocks to parade in the yard, a rooster to wake us at dawn. But I woke one day and realized a house of birds has walls of feathers that fly away the first time the wind blows. I woke up on the reservation and saw my house just as it was: a plywood shack with a roof of corrugated tin where the birds never landed, where the sound of rain on metal could make you go mad. Nobody sang to me, but my whole body was awake with sound, and the sound was my baby’s cry. I heard it so deep I thought my bones were sobbing.