Rags & Bones Page 11

  I took another sip of beer. “Have you, ah … ever thought about selling food here? I mean, something besides onion rings and greaseburgers? Because, maybe … ”

  The bartender snorted again. “Ha. Well. I guess you know what kind of food my regulars like, don’t you?”

  He reached out to shake my hand, and I was home at last.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE …………………………………

  “The Jolly Corner” by Henry James is—to simplify—the story of a man who comes home after a long time away and meets the ghost of the person he might have become, if he’d never moved away. It’s a haunting and thought-provoking story, and has always appealed to my obsession with those turning-point moments in life, when you could have become someone other than the person you are: chance meetings that transformed your romantic or working life, opportunities seized or allowed to slip away, literal and figurative roads taken, or not. It seemed to me that, if it were possible to meet the ghosts of our possible lives, there wouldn’t be just one ghost—there would be dozens, scores, maybe hundreds, sharing some essential qualities, but radically different in other respects.

  And who’s to say this life, the one I’m living right now, isn’t really just the ghost of some other, vastly different existence?

  Oh, and while I’m no chef, I am a North Carolina boy who lives in the East Bay nowadays. Willard’s B-B-Q is inspired by the legendary Wilber’s Barbecue in Goldsboro, North Carolina, home of the One True Barbecue. Stop by if you’re ever in town.

  Millcara

  HOLLY BLACK

  Wake up. Wake up. You have to wake up.

  I want to say that I never meant for it to happen, but I never ever mean for it to happen and it always does happen and I keep on doing it, so what does that say about me? Mother told me that keeping going when other folks don’t is the difference between them that succeed in this world and them that lie down in a ditch to die, but I don’t know if I can keep going if you’re not with me.

  Remember when we dreamed about each other? When you were only a little girl, you dreamed that I came into your room and got into bed with you and pressed my mouth against your neck. And I dreamed it too—the exact same thing, waking up in your room, not sure how I got there and climbing into bed with you. I remember how warm and lovely it was right up until you started screaming. That has to mean something. That has to mean that our souls were destined for one another, that fate wants us to be something more to each other than—

  WAKE UP.

  Wakeupwakeupwakeupwakeup.

  Even if you wake up and hate me.

  And yes, I admit it, Mother has a scam. Your father suspected as much in the end and your uncle too. They were right—right about everything, except how much we really were friends, best friends just like we swore, just like we smeared in blood on one another’s dirty palms, just like we whispered against one another’s skin. But it’s true that Mother does get into car accidents in front of rich families with daughters about my age. Usually fathers and daughters on their own. The accidents aren’t the easiest to plan—she has to find a park where she knows the family goes for walks in early summer evenings. (We grow overheated and lethargic when the sun is high in the sky, so Mother knows our best performances will be at night.) Then she has to arrange to have the car break down suddenly—with an engine fire if possible, conjured with sleight of hand and a little spilled gasoline.

  I should add that these are never her cars. She borrows them or steals them and, as you might guess, abandons them once I am securely in the hands of my new family.

  But things will be different now. It will be just the two of us and we’ll make up new games. We’ll be sisters, just like any two girls with the same blood in their veins. We’ll be sisters and more than sisters. We’ll run through museums, mocking and applauding, until the security guards chase us. We’ll pretend to be statues on the street and scare people by moving. We’ll be bold and brave and do things no one has thought of before and we’ll do them always together.

  I’ll make a deal with you, how about that? I’ll tell you the rest of it. Everything, Laura. The ugly parts too. And in return you’ll get up, won’t you, sleepyhead? I will tempt you with coffee and bagels and my own mouth on yours, breathing you back to life.

  So here it is, all the truth:

  The plan is supposed to play out exactly like it did, except for the ending. Immediately after the car accident, Mother always springs out in great distress, pointing to the father of the family, just as she did to your father: “Help me, sir, please, my child is still in the car! I don’t know what to do! No, no ambulance. Just help me get her some air.”

  She says that once people are singled out of a crowd, they almost always do what they’re asked. Isn’t that odd? It’s like magic, like how people thought that if a witch knew your name, she could make you do whatever she wanted.

  If only that were true, I’d make you wake up.

  My part in the plan is to go very limp when I’m picked up, and then seem to awaken at the ministrations of father and daughter. I am to blink up into their eyes and charm them with my pliant and sweet nature. I am so very grateful! Mother is so very beautiful! She weeps a single crystal tear! Then Mother has to deal with something about the car and oh—your apartment or house or villa or chalet is so close by that you want to take her dear daughter there? Well, how kind and unexpected!

  They never see Mother again. She comes back for me eventually, but by then I’m creeping away like a thief in the night.

  It usually goes just as it did with your family:

  • First, I explain that I don’t know her cell phone number. It’s a new cell phone, her last one was stolen and she changed the number. I cry prettily over how stupid I am. (You might think me vain to say this, but I practice; real crying is so often ugly.)

  • I am very charming. Again, please don’t think me vain; I have had a long time to become charming. I can speak to your father in French and I have perfect manners. I always wash the dishes after dinner. I remain poised on the brink of adolescence; I will never reach thirteen. On the first night, I faint dramatically, so as to show I was dealing bravely with my pain. The fainting embarrasses me very much. I forget myself and speak more French as I come around, half in a delirium. Everyone likes a little blonde girl with wide eyes begging their pardon en français.

  • When your family begins to press about my family, I drop hints of an overbearing and very rich European father and a nasty divorce.

  • Just as everyone is sure Mother has abandoned me entirely, she calls. She’s in the hospital and she’s so very sorry to inconvenience the family. She should be out soon, but she’s not supposed to use her phone and if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, could I stay there tonight and maybe tomorrow? Your father shouldn’t agree, but he does. When he puts down the phone, he’s embarrassed he’s agreed, but he has.

  • Then, finally, days later, my mysterious European father calls. Mother is irresponsible and dangerous, he says, and his daughter has made such a fast friend in yours that it would be a shame to part them. He offers a decent chunk of money (five thousand dollars!) to let me stay for the rest of the summer. Otherwise, he will send me a plane ticket and I can fly home by myself—I’m certainly old enough and so what if flying frightens me. (Father’s role has been acted out by a variety of players and his exact country of origin changes with the accent that each person can fake the best.)

  It doesn’t work every time, but you’d be surprised how often it does. Fathers raising little girls on their own are away a lot and they don’t like their daughters to be all by themselves in their vast apartments. They trust their staff, but not like they trust the aristocratic and slightly naïve daughter of a rich European. And it’s summer after all, hot sticky summer, when all the rules are different.

  Remember how it was when I came home with you? I rode up in your building’s chrome elevator, watching your face reflected in the metal. You were so incredibly beautifu
l that I think I lost my heart to you in that moment. Your windblown tangle of honey-dark hair and eyes the color of tree sap, liquid and luminous, made me feel faint wanting only to be closer to you, to press my clammy hand in yours. You saw me looking and smiled a tiny smile. It felt like passing notes right under the nose of the teacher.

  When we got to your apartment, with big windows looking down on the park and air-conditioning so cold that the hairs rose on your arms, you took me right to your room. I sat on your bed, pretending to still be weak from the accident, leaning my head against the comforter and inhaling the smell of you, of strawberry shampoo and Hello Kitty perfume. You docked your iPod and played a song I had never heard before, one with a girl wailing about the wretchedness of her love. I asked about the books on your shelves, ones I’d never seen before, about black holes, astrophysics, and one by Carl Sagan called The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark that made me shudder with the dread of discovery.

  “I want to see space someday,” you said. “It’s the last great mystery, other than what’s at the bottom of the ocean. Either way, I’m going to wear a suit like Iron Man’s and see things no one has ever seen before.”

  See, I remember it word for word. I remember everything.

  “I think there are mysteries everywhere,” I told you. “If you’re looking for them.”

  You snorted, but you didn’t look displeased. “Like what?”

  “I’ll show you,” I promised. “Tomorrow.”

  “It better not be one of those mysteries like ‘why do people sneeze when they’re exposed to a burst of sunlight?’ ”

  “Is that true?” I asked, fascinated, my bragging forgotten.

  Your father ordered in Thai food and we ate it at the raw-edged Nakashima dining table next to the wall of windows. I never have much appetite, so I pushed my pad thai around and listened to you and your father talk. He was quiet, but unexpectedly funny in the way only quiet people can be and too polite to ask me all the questions I could see swimming in his eyes. But you asked me about what pets I had, whether there were horses at my private school, what Broadway shows Mother and I had seen, what books I loved, what television shows I watched and whether there were different shows in Europe that were better than American television. I talked and talked and talked. When I looked out at the city, sparkling in the early evening, my heart swelled with giddy joy.

  Then I cleared the table and washed the dishes, over your protests, slumping to the floor just as I was about to put down the drying cloth. It was a really good performance. You let me lie down in your bed and rested next to me, taking my temperature by pressing your wrist to my brow, like some grown-up must have once done for you. Then you read to me, softly, from a book of fairy tales that you said were silly, but good for the sick. I didn’t tell you that I didn’t think they were silly at all. Later that night, my mother called and charmed your father with her distress.

  The next day, I said I had to go out to get a few things, but really I went to a storage unit in Midtown and brought back my own clothes in Bergdorf shopping bags.

  And from then, everything was perfect. Lying in front of the big flat-screen, watching cartoons in the mornings; giggling over adding powdered cocoa to the milk in our cereal; passing gum back and forth by blowing huge bubbles and pressing them together until they stuck and one of us took the whole thing, tasting each other’s spit in our mouths. Walking through the park with iced coffees, pressing the cups against one another’s bare skin to surprise one of us into a shriek; trying on counterfeit McQueen scarves and short plastic skirts on Canal Street; and meeting up with your friends to see movies in deliciously cold theaters where we shared slushies that stained our mouths ruby red.

  And then your cousin Bertha got sick and died within a week of her first symptom. I bet you’re thinking about that, thinking about how I’d go down to her apartment on the eleventh floor on Wednesdays to watch that show about aliens that you thought was stupid. I bet you’re thinking about how it was a Thursday morning when she collapsed.

  I know what you’re thinking, but let me explain.

  Have you ever felt that when you were around a particular someone you were smarter and funnier and more beautiful? That all your charm and her charm ricocheted back and forth until it amplified itself to almost impossible heights? That’s what it’s like. Both of you are radiant, glowing with it. Her cheeks are rosy and her eyes are bright as flames. No one could resist her and I can’t either. The thought of being without her is painful, impossible.

  At the sound of her voice, you come alive. You feel it like the cresting of some dark wave out at sea. Her heart leaps and yours leaps with it. Then she’s gone.

  They die so fast sometimes. An afternoon of giggling. A weekend of sleepovers and secrets. A night of whispered confessions.

  But could you really give up feeling that way? Could you give up the giddy joy of being so in tune with another that you can finish one another’s thoughts? Could you give up being understood and being surprised and being made into a wholly finer version of yourself?

  And you don’t understand that when they’re fading, when they’re sick, I don’t feel smug or pleased, I feel panicked. I feel like I am being left behind by the one person in the world I would most hate to lose.

  And in that moment, they see me for what I am and despise me.

  After Bertha died, things were different. Your aunt spent hours crying to your father, pacing the room, raving about how she had brought this on herself. How your uncle’s work was dangerous and that it had always been only a matter of time before they struck at him. He was flying in from Chicago for the funeral, although your aunt told him that his daughter’s memory would be best served if he stayed away.

  I asked you what she meant once, but you said you didn’t know.

  I think you lied about that, but I don’t blame you. You probably didn’t want to scare me. You probably thought that your aunt was being silly and that I was superstitious enough to believe it.

  I should have seen the danger, but I was too busy being tangled up in your world, listening to your sorrows and making your joys my own.

  Remember that museum exhibit about vampires? It was at the very beginning of my stay, when we were still tentative with one another. How it made us laugh! They had the original cape that Bela Lugosi wore on the set of Dracula and the flowing gray nightgown dresses of his brides. There was a picture of his house in the Hollywood Hills with bright pink bougainvillea spilling down one side and his chihuahuas, which he called the Children of the Night. Then there was the picture of the dashing Lord Byron and the tale of how, after he broke his friend Polidori’s heart, Polidori modeled the villainous Lord Ruthven in his book, The Vampyre, after the poet.

  “Do you think they did it?” you asked.

  “Did it? You mean Lord Byron and Polidori?” I asked. Lord Byron was handsome enough, but whatever magnetism had caused lover after lover to drown in his eyes was missing in the stillness of the portrait. His lip could not rise ever so slightly, tempting you to believe that you could cause him to truly smile if only you worked hard enough at it. “Maybe. Or maybe Polidori just pined away, loving Byron from afar.”

  “Have you ever been in love?” you asked me. Do you remember that?

  “Yes,” I told you. And I was. Of course I was. I still am.

  “Did you tell the person?” You were watching me, as though my answer mattered.

  “I’m shy,” I said.

  “You should leave a note,” you advised me. “Can you imagine if Polidori left a note for Byron: I LIIIIIIIKE YOU. IF YOU LIKE ME, CHECK THE BOX AND PASS NOTE TO SHELLEY.”

  I felt light-headed. You dragged me on.

  Then we saw a series of photos with cards explaining how certain chemicals found in certain soils preserve a corpse and can even give it the appearance of life, how hair and nails grew after death, and how, at one time, people who suffered from something called catalepsy were accidentally buried alive. Th
ey’d seem dead, but they could still see and hear everything. Sometimes they’d start moving in their coffins, trying to scrabble their way out before the tons of dirt above crashed down and suffocated them. It was awful, awful, awful. We walked past the drawings illustrating the bloody and broken nails of those bodies. Then more drawings, these of how some dead were buried upside down, so the newly animated corpse would dig itself deeper into the earth instead of climbing out of its grave.

  Thinking about a vampire tunneling deeper and deeper, I felt as though I could no longer breathe. It was too easy to think of dirt surrounding me on all sides, pressing down on my chest, cold and heavy. I sank to the floor of the exhibit and you had to sit there beside me while I explained in my own tangled way.

  Then you took me to the bathroom and made me sit on the sink and press damp paper towels against my neck until I felt better.

  You promised me that when I died, you would make sure my parents cremated me. You would insist that I should have what I wanted, you said fiercely, as passionate as I have ever heard you. I would never wake up alone and afraid, choking on grave dirt—not if you had anything to do with it.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell you that it was not fear that had made me weak and mewling, but memory.

  On the way out, we stopped at the gift shop. You pointed and laughed at the fake widow’s peaks, the contact lenses that turned eyes red, and the glitter body gel. We picked out twin amulets with tiny crystals forming the shape of eyes. They were supposed to protect us from evil. I loved to see it sparkling at the hollow of your throat. I wanted to believe in it, to believe it could really protect you from me, but three days after Bertha died and two days before her funeral, you fell ill.