And She Was (31 page)

“The house will be inspected. Make sure everything is scrubbed. She’ll ask questions. Say what she wants to hear.”

The door burst open as Liz reached for her sweater. Nicholas, urine stains around his crotch, red eyes, purple swollen cheek and blood-tinged nostrils, lurched through. Liz stepped quickly out of his way. She smelled the booze seeping from his mouth and pores. It mingled with the smell of dried blood. A shot of fear raced down her legs and rose again to burrow into her belly. He made it to the couch and
flopped down, boots laying curls of mud on a bright yellow throw pillow. Liz and Rita watched as his eyes rolled back and he fell asleep.

“Can he be sent off for a while?” Liz asked.

Rita watched her son, only nineteen, already falling. “He’s not a bad boy,” she said, softly, slowly. “No place has been left for him, nothing to give.”

Again Liz felt the looming helplessness. Everywhere she went, every home, every family, she heard the sucking noise, saw the stench uncovered as hope pulled away. So many of this generation were lost; but the children could be saved, the six-year-olds, the two-year-olds. She tried to remember what her mother had said, what she had passed down from her mother before. Her people carried the strength and courage of thousands of years in their blood and hands. It could not be easily destroyed, only polluted. If they only held on until times changed, until they could clean themselves, the old power would endure.

She watched Nicholas, sleeping like death.

“Try to get him out for the next few days.”

Rita said nothing.

Would it have mattered if Rita had found Nicholas another couch on which to pass out the day Miss Holton came? Would it have mattered if Nicholas had left the bar only two hours, one hour later? Liz didn’t think so. Busy Mouth would not stop until she had emptied the village of children. She would have found something else. Nicholas was convenient.

The day the four children left, Liz escaped to the church. Tears blurred her vision when she looked up at the onion-domed bell tower, the highest point in town. The perennial eagle perched there stared down at her with sharp, accusing eyes. She pushed open the double doors and waited to absorb the peace she was accustomed to feeling here. She turned to face the icon paintings stretching across the east wall. She focused on the painting of Christ ascending from the cross. The children would be on the plane by now. She thought of their small feet making big steps up the plane’s stairs, their faces blank, their
knees weak. Her eyes traveled along the wall. She gazed at each saint, willing them to speak to her, tell her why. She heard nothing.

She didn’t cry. She screamed. She pulled at her hair and fell to her knees, rocking. Nineteen. Nineteen. The number broke against her forehead. She felt as if her skull would splinter. She thought of the others who would follow. Because there would be more. Babies born, fathers lost. More and more. She walked to the platform from which she read the Holy Scriptures each week and stood in the familiar spot, looking out at an empty room, so rich in color and the images of faith. Her eyes dried. She looked again; the room had changed. The icons, so alive, so meaningful, had flattened, losing themselves against the walls.

How long she stayed alone in the church, Liz didn’t know. It was dark as she made her way to Ida’s house. Ida had asked her to come. “There are things I must tell you,” she had said. As she walked the dim road, Liz felt longing and fear. Even as she opened the door, a part of her knew that whatever Ida meant to speak of would change everything.

“Come and sit.” Ida lit a candle on the table before her. Liz blinked at the point of light. She saw Ida and Anna watching her. Liz obeyed her mother’s old friend. Two more candles were lit. They sat in silence several minutes.

“Busy Mouth will return in less than a week. We don’t have much time to plan,” Ida said.

Another silence followed. Liz waited. Just the word—
plan
—brought back the warmth.

Plan.

“A long story must be told,” Ida said, folding her hands in her lap. “It’s a story our grandmothers told our mothers, back generations. It’s a story not easy to hear. Maybe you feel you already know a part.”

And like generations of young women about to be brought into the circle in which they were born, Liz felt a tension growing in her body, rising from her abdomen to her heart, her throat, her mouth. The taste almost familiar, a sense she was about to remember something she once knew. She pressed the muscles of her shoulders flat where they had crept close to her ears.

“Our mothers’ mothers’ mothers were starving long ago and decided to step in the way of fate.”

As Ida told the story, the taste grew in Liz’s mouth. She found herself easing it about with her tongue, testing it in different spots until she recognized the flavor of hope. It was not a light taste, a promising taste, as hope is expected to taste. But dark and dense and powerful. This taste didn’t come naturally but had been scraped raw from the living. She swallowed hard as it grew sharper against her cheeks.

That Anna didn’t balk, didn’t even question Ida’s direction, felt at once eerie and expected. Talk never approached right and wrong, a failure that would plague Liz in the years ahead. But that night, sitting around her candlelit table, she did not notice the skips their minds made. The plan, dark with hope, rose without hindrance, a reef exposed by low tide.

As she walked up the long road to her cabana, Liz felt something brush her cheek. She smiled and looked up into the hills. The wind had found its path again.

When Busy Mouth returned, Liz was the one who invited herself and the others to her cabana. “We are coming to tea at seven. We have items to discuss.” She turned away before Busy Mouth could respond, the invitation firmed by avoidance.

That evening the women journeyed to the caves and ate what they took from the Dry Ones. They did so on the shore as their grandmothers’ grandmothers had, mixing the mummy flesh with oil bit by bit until it felt like lard under their fingers. Liz took the fat willingly, eagerly even. As she held the glistening dollop between her fingers, ready to place it on her tongue, she felt that in a moment all would be well, the future secured, a solution hoisted high. She could see the wall of water faltering, breaking on outer reefs, where it could do little harm. She tasted the fat, closed her eyes, and sighed.

Liz made the tea, adding the monkshood juice Ida had gathered and boiled down. Liz placed three lumps of sugar in the cup to cover the bitter taste and set it before Busy Mouth. She tried not to watch her drink but couldn’t keep her eyes from flicking upward into that pink face, watching those colored lips pursing to drain dainty sips.

Miss Holton spoke of the nice family kind enough to take in the children. The big backyard with a swing and a tree house, the lovely
casseroles the woman made, the school nearby with courses in almost everything.

“Lizzy,” she said, leaning close, “I think it’s going to get better.” She reached for Liz’s hand. “We’re saving the children.”

Liz let her hand rest under Busy Mouth’s, afraid to slide away, afraid even to flinch. Bile rose in her throat, and she swallowed hard. She stared at Busy Mouth’s hair because she could not look at those round, hopeful eyes.

Miss Holton touched the side of her head and said, “I don’t feel well.”

Then she fell off her chair and hit the vinyl floor with a saggy thump. Her left shoe popped off with the angle of her fall.
The children.
Liz felt Miss Holton’s last thought seep from her brain into the floor.
The children.

Anna washed their cups, wiped the table. Liz stepped over Miss Holton, opened the service compartment to the stove, blew out the pilot light, and turned the propane release to full-on. She returned to the table and lit one small candle. Ida and Anna exited first. Liz turned back at the door. She saw curls of auburn hair soft against the orange-yellow floor. She saw the candle flame rise and fall in the slight breeze. She shut the door and followed the short path toward the road.

Half an hour later, Miss Holton’s cabana exploded. Liz heard the initial roar, then the splintering pops. She had stayed at Anna’s, too tired to journey up the hillside to her cabana. When the villagers ran to the house, forming a futile bucket brigade to the beach, Liz and Anna stayed near the back. Ida didn’t come. Liz listened with her new ears for hints of suspicion and heard none. Her first ears heard the simple words.

“The propane got left on, is my guess,” an older man said.

“Dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“These white girls shouldn’t be allowed to live alone out here. They get themselves in trouble.”

Liz and Anna looked at each other only once as dawn slipped across the water and through the ryegrass. They were safe. The children were safe; no more would be taken.

Liz tried not to think of Busy Mouth in the weeks that followed.
When the image of her auburn hair coiled on the floor came, Liz shut her eyes tight. She thought about the chores she had that day, about the food deliveries, or the meeting with Father Ivan. When night came and she had no easy diversions, she poured herself a drink of whiskey and pulled an afghan around her shoulders. She did not talk to Ida or Anna about that night. To do so would betray something pure and old. To admit guilt would admit doubt, and not just about what she had done but about what her ancestors had started, back to the very beginnings.

Eleven weeks later, the new social worker arrived. For eleven weeks no complaints were made, no homes inspected, no children taken. Father Ivan asked the Sisters to greet the new woman Friday afternoon when her plane flew in. Anna agreed. Liz agreed. Ida refused.

Did Liz imagine a different sort of woman? A woman who gulped her tea, occasionally slopping on the saucer. A woman whose eyes didn’t linger on forgotten bits of food peeking from beneath the stove. More normal in size, darker of skin. More able to see past things and into them.

The answer was yes. It was the only answer, after one has killed to make it so.

Miss Sandra Kartuse stepped off the plane and onto the gravel runway in a yellow dress with yellow sandals on a bright spring day. Her light brown hair swept back in a loose knot. Father Ivan stepped forward; introductions were made. Liz felt the first tinge of doubt as she watched Miss Kartuse let Father Ivan lead her up the gravel airstrip. She watched the long legs and big feet, the small steps.

When the Sisters met for the first time with the new social worker in the church, Ida refused to come. Miss Kartuse was less sure of herself, more tentative in her questions. Liz, sitting beside her, held on to this difference, sure it would mean everything.

Liz saw Ida enter. Saw her stride toward them. When Ida stopped in front of the new social worker, Liz felt fear ripple through her. She longed to stop Ida, whatever the old woman intended.

“Does this one mean to take our children too?” Ida stood five feet from Miss Kartuse. Ida did not look into her eyes, but above her head.

“What do you mean?” Miss Kartuse asked.

Ida did not answer. Liz felt the weight of response shift to her. After a full minute of silence, Liz spoke. “She means, will you search through our homes for unfed children and through our garbage heaps for empty bottles so that you can rip our children from us.”

Miss Kartuse looked uncertain, startled, and fearful for a moment, then she smiled. A wisp of light hair fell across her cheek as she reached for Liz. She patted Liz’s arm three quick times.

“Now, Lizzy,” she said, soothing and sure. “You know I’m not here to take anything from your people. I’m here to help.”

Ida spun and headed for the door. Liz and Anna scraped back their metal chairs and followed her wordlessly outside.

They never returned. Liz would never enter the church again. Without these three women, the Orthodox Sisterhood floundered, then collapsed.

Most people believed it was the loss of nineteen children in fifteen months that broke the Sisterhood’s heart. It was this story that achieved dominance and was passed down as truth. Liz nodded from her bar stool and let them believe it was a void of sorrow that brought her there, not the unforgettable knowledge of her own evil hand. And at times, when that knowledge became too much, she would take a marker to the walls.

It was the same instinct that had led her to mark the walls in the scruffy outhouse at the Duration Village twenty years before—to confess her pain, her horror, and her anger. When she moved the marker against a paint-slick wall, for a few moments, the hidden things shifted their weight to her hands, to the ink, to the building, to the land itself, and she felt the burden lift.

For years she wrote about Busy Mouth’s death. Little things that amounted to nothing.
Auburn hair. Gas-lit candles.
Ida checked the bathroom regularly and washed them off. She let Liz have her words, now as she had then, but never too many, never enough to raise questions. In the years to come, Liz would have other deaths to write about. But always they were blurred images of the first one, the one that took her innocence. And her words would become more bitter, more cryptic.
Dry flesh. Poison hands. We watch. Wasted.

In her outhouse skirted round with ryegrass, she wrote only once,
but the words remained part of the gray wood and sweeping mountainside. A year after Miss Holton’s murder she sat on the edge of the seat planks and wrote the story. She had been mostly drunk, and words came crooked and loose. But it was all there.

She took 19. Sent them away to white, bleached kitchens and tree houses. She would have taken more. We did it like our mothers’ mothers said, with dead-man’s fat and a plan. No one knew I let the gas on and lit the candle. I saw her auburn hair on the floor before I shut the door. I thought we would save some. 1968—one year past.

SEPTEMBER 7, 1986

T
here’s something unsettling about the wind. Something that lets you know things are not so described and organized. People attach words like
clean, refreshing
to the wind, but those are words striving to tame something that scares us at the edges. Try not to be so banal, so condemned. It’s more like
purify, scour
. The wind doesn’t fuck around.

You’re standing somewhere, firmly you, with all the thoughts, feelings, markings of who you’ve always been. A wind rustles over your ears, pulses against skin. And suddenly everything’s different, everything’s possible. Each gust brings a trace of things far away and unseen, pushing over you, through you. You’re powerful. You can do anything. Change smashes through an instant until nothing looks the same.

Think I’m exaggerating? Then why do we stop what we’re doing when that first breath of wind brushes the path? Why do we look up, out, meeting it full in the face? Why do we stay until our cheeks feel like the surfaces of glass? A biting wind, a warm breeze, wind slung with ice, or flying leaves, or tossed-out paper plates. They whisper, they shout—“move with us, unlash, fly.”

I turned from the view and walked toward the bike with the wind slamming my back.

I still won’t admit that I knew where I was going. I did know I
wanted off this island as much as they wanted me off. Like a pebble in my shoe, this strange quality of wanting something poked at me, an uncomfortable, unfamiliar feeling. But it made me aware of my foot, my step, my destination like I’d never been before. The old women were right—I had to leave. There was nothing here for me, nothing real to fill my hands. I balled them into fists and wondered what it would feel like to hold my own future.

The hilltop was deserted now, everyone inside. Whatever Carl had done, I had done, would be in the hands of others now. I threw my leg across the seat of my bike and gave the starter a kick.

But the old women had been wrong about one thing—they thought I’d taken from their precious mummies, eaten dead-man’s fat. The thought sickened me. Not simply the idea of eating long-dead human flesh, but the awareness that I believed in it. That I believed their story from beginning to end. That I believed they had stolen lives from fate and paid with their innocence.

I still wasn’t much of a rider. I had a crosswind to deal with and wasn’t at all sure how best to handle it. I rode at a steady speed and tucked my head down. Occasionally a clump of dead grass or trash blew across my path. An empty beer can hit my shoulder. The plastic front fender had twisted even farther and now seemed to be directing a constant splatter of mud right at my neck. I crossed town and went east. The headlight illuminated only the strip of road right in front of me in the darker night brought by thick clouds. So I really didn’t have the chance to avoid many of the potholes. I took them in with my shoulders and legs until a rattled numbness encased my body.

When the rain hit, I was nearly at the path that cut away from the ocean, cleaving between the mountains. I shut down the bike and started walking. The grass bent with wind and water, wiping itself on my jeans. My suede jacket turned dark and grew heavy. My hair turned dark too. It took in the rain and let it go again in the wind. It whipped in drenched strands across my face.

I reached the cliff face an hour later, nothing but a sodden mass of clothes and hair. I could not hesitate this time. I edged along the first narrow spot. The rock shelf was slippery, but the wind pushed me against the wall like a hand holding me safe.

When I reached the cave, I ducked right in. I suppose there was fear, but not the creepy kind, the eeekkk kind. More of the fear of possibility. I was pulling on a thread that became a string, then a rope, growing thicker until it could support nearly anything.

I fished out the silver vial from my pocket, rolling it between my fingers. I flipped the lid up in the dark and poured the teaspoon of coke on my palm. I ran my wet finger through the powder, quickly turning to paste, and rubbed it across my gums. I held the rest out to the wind, then wiped my hand on my jeans. My lighter wouldn’t work at first. Rain had seeped even into my pockets.

Several flicks later, the orange glow spread from my fist. The light sprang up, casting shadows against the low ceiling. I breathed in air so sauna-hot and dry it baked my nostrils. I moved left—toward the three bodies resting just inside the entrance. The ones I’d tripped over before. The ones I knew.

I realized this was my moment of truth. This was the first and last great choice from which all others would flow. Would I do this? Would I defy the old women? They had done this terrible thing to gain the power to live, to see their people live. What power did I seek?

I knelt beside the body closest to the entrance, the one I imagined was Fenia. Skin still clung to bone around her forehead, between her eyes, and in swaths over her cheeks. I sought the power to choose, to control my own fate. The power to be fully human. And then I understood all at once the change that had replaced the woman I was with the woman I was becoming. Some part of myself mourned for that lost woman, the parties, the men, the sweet ignorance, the dizzy oblivion. But the larger part looked into the future, saw a woman who would never forget Liz’s contorted face, or the pulse of Ida’s low moan, or Bellie’s legend, or the feel of mummy flesh in my fingers.

I reached for Fenia’s exposed hand, lying on her black thigh. This hand had been tasted before. Only one finger remained. Fenia had saved this for me. It broke as easily as dry bread crusts, the bones falling like ash into my vial.

I felt elated, infused with knowledge and curiosity, and afraid, casting quick glances into shadows. I stepped out of the cave and onto the ledge. A strange sensation crept down my right arm until it formed a
heat in my palm. I opened my fingers to see the now full vial. Full hands. I held them up to the storm. And, some part of me believed, to Ida, Anna, Liz, and Bellie.

“See,” I shouted. “Full hands.”

Sitting on a worn brown couch at the marina rec room, I kept my eyes on the ocean. I could see the white, red, and green lights of the ferry slowly churning up the bay. I lit another cigarette and waited. I had that antsy, night-before-school-starts feeling—all calm on the outside, but inside a zillion neurons firing with a million suggestions.

I had stopped by the cabana, grabbed my Crown Royal bag of money, latrinealia notebook, packed a bag of clothes, and pulled my Aleut Mona Lisa from its nail. I pried the back off the frame, rolled her up, and tucked her among soft sweaters. The books I crammed into a backpack. I tried not to think about much as I stuffed it all into my saddlebags. If I’d stopped to think, I would have lost momentum. And that’s all I had going for me.

I watched the lights get closer, reach the dock. A few people walked down the gangplank. It was midnight. The rain had stopped and left itself in pools on the dock. The wind had slowed, only bothering with looser things. A Snickers wrapper dashed itself against my boot. I picked it up and threw it in a trash can.

I walked to the boat. The woman running the ticket desk was on the dock having a cigarette.

“You going?” she asked.

“Yeah. Me and a bike.”

She crushed her cigarette under a shoe. I reached in my pocket and pulled out several wet twenties. She shoved a ticket at me.

I rode my bike up a metal ramp into the ferry, parked alongside a concrete wall, and walked up three flights of stairs. On the top deck the familiar sprawling lounge, upholstered in burgundy, sat behind glass. The engines rumble under my feet, and I turned to look out. The boat eased away from the dock, leaving the gangplank a broken arm jutting over blackness.

I stepped through doors and onto the back deck. The rail hit my
sternum, and I leaned against it. The wind brushed its drying fingers through my hair, lightening its weight.

My fingers found the slim silver vial, crusted with turquoise, inside my pocket. Without taking it out, I flicked open the lid with my thumb and slid my pinkie inside. I circled the pad of my fingertip slowly across the top, feeling the dry flakes crumble to powder. I withdrew my finger, felt a greasy residue, and snapped the lid shut.

I thought of Liz and Ida and Bellie, of all the women who had lived and loved and died and left something of themselves on this island vanishing before me. I thought of the taboos they had broken, the price they had paid. The knowledge of their lives and the lives of their mothers and grandmothers felt as heavy as the weight of that full vial in my pocket. It’s rare to feel the import of a moment as it passes. But I did then, in those moments as the dark ocean widened between me and the land. That island had been mine for only two months, but it had changed everything. They had changed everything. I was breaking my own taboo. I was going for the first time without anyone leading the way. The price, however, would not be mine to decide.

The heft of this awareness ground my boots firmly on the deck. I walked inside the lounge and ordered a whiskey sour. Did I feel different? I suppose I did. I felt a sense of my future. Not a small future like what I’m going to wear tomorrow. And nothing certain or planned. No goals materialized. I just knew they would come and they would be my own. I had only one destination. Ever-New. I would get the dog. I imagined that Cowboy had laid his big head on Dad’s thigh as he died in that hot car. Dad had needed him. And now he needed me. I’d watch out for him like he’d watched out for Dad. Together we’d hunt down a future. For the first time, I knew I’d chosen something simply because it was right.

Of course, it would be dangerous. Moving with full hands always is. Like an egg race. Careful. Delicate and fragile steps. A lot of damage can be done with full hands. Shells crack, break. But nothing is wasted, even if it goes all wrong, painfully wrong. That much I was sure of. The wasting was over.

I turned from the bar and scanned the lounge. An expanse of emptiness. A place designed to hold so many people, so many conversations,
plans, stories. It stretched the width of the ferry, dark windows on each side, glowing with the reflection of pushed-in chairs, clean tables. The bartender had gone in the back, leaving only the hum of the engine, fading in constancy. The emptiness welcomed the way a blank canvas or deserted stage does, calling you to come create something. I thought about the song Bellie had sung with me. She’d been wrong. It was never intended to be filled in with a word. The last word had not been left out, an intentional trick to convince some they were in the know. There was no last word. It was the blank line at the end of a test sentence. It was the question waiting for an answer. And I could pick anything. No one was watching.

I laughed and twirled around, just once, just spilling a sip’s worth on the burgundy carpet.

I made my way, drink balanced in my right hand, to the head behind the bar. It was empty, touched only with the glare of commercial light. I didn’t mean to look in the mirror, but some part of me must have caught sight of my reflection and been startled. I turned to face myself. My hair—all that blond fluff and flow—clung to my scalp in a dark straight sheath. My face was so vulnerable, so obvious without all that hair. I touched it tenderly, like a newborn baby. I looked in my own eyes and saw someone for the first time.

I pushed open the pinkish tan stall door. My glass clinked on the cool white toilet tank, ice bobbing in golden liquid.

I fished a thick black marker from my purse. Did I know what I would write as my pen touched the solid tile? Not that I could tell. I watched my hand move over inch-high letters, breath held.

Non sum ego quod fueran,
my fingers finished.
I am not what I was.
And in sheer inspiration, and with my conscious mind, I added the flourish of an exclamation point, thick and bold.