Delta Girls (10 page)

I checked Ben’s face, but he just looked concerned.

“You smell like peanut butter,” said Quinn. She showed me the signature on a tourist brochure:
Dear Quinn, Shoot for the Stars!

“Let’s just go.” I grabbed Quinn’s hand and pulled her to the car.

———

I STAYED QUIET
as Ben and Quinn chattered away on the way home about an elaborate community kitchen garden in Locke—some of the remaining Chinese residents grew bitter melon, fuzzy melon, winter melon there, plus long beans, Chinese okra, other vegetables I hadn’t heard of. When the conversation turned to television news, I felt myself pull into myself even more.

“You better save that signature,” said Ben. “It will be worth something someday.”

Any energy that I had been sending out to Ben was sucked right back into my own muscles. He must have sensed it; his energy stopped reaching toward me, too. I felt hard and lonely inside my skin, my whole body closed, like a fist.

N
ATHAN LOOKED FLAYED IN HIS RED UNITARD. KAREN
could barely touch him during their practice session. Her own dress, which had seemed so sexy, felt like a stupid joke.

“I hope you washed your hands well,” she said. “I don’t want to catch anything.”

“Listen to you, Miss Germophobe,” said Nathan.

“I’m sure she at least has HPV,” said Karen.

“Someone has their panties in a wad today.”

“Someone has seen too many panties,” she said.

She wanted to strangle him when he laughed.

MISS RHODE ISLAND
and her partner were late coming to the ice for practice. No one in the locker room had been willing to give up a spare lace, so the pair’s coach, to Karen’s delight, had to buy a set from one of the busy vendors in the lobby and then take the time to relace the boot. Rhode Island shot Karen a hateful
look as she skated by in her ice blue dress, holding her pissed-off partner’s hand.

Karen wanted to feel a surge of triumph, but she just felt tired. And off balance. She fell after the throw triple salchow and jarred her tailbone. She didn’t even attempt the side-by-side double axel. She felt dizzy after the death spiral. She could see her mother lifting her arms in exasperation.

“Get it together,” said Nathan. She wanted to kick him with her blade. She wanted to see his red blood seep through the red fabric, drip beautiful red drops all over the pearly ice. Instead, she dug her fingernails into the backs of his hands during their next press lift, and was disarmed when he gave her an affectionate squeeze back.

KAREN TRIED TO
catch her bearings, to find her center, as they walked around in their skate guards to keep their muscles loose after the practice session. She snapped her headphones on, listened to
Tristan und Isolde
over and over again, trying to visualize the performance, trying to drown out the other music and the crowd’s cheers and gasps as one couple after another took to the ice for their long program. Still, she couldn’t concentrate. She looked over at Nathan, headphones clamped over his ears, too, as he lunged and stretched and rolled his head around. As he marked the choreography, lifting his empty hands, tossing a ghost Karen.

She could barely hear the music, even with the volume turned up. All she could hear was the blood in her head. She took a deep breath, rolled down the length of her spine, let all the blood rush to her face. When she rolled back up, she felt light-headed and stumbled a few steps backwards.

“Come on, Karen, focus, please,” her mother said, her voice tight with stress.

Karen closed her eyes. She tried to slow her heart inside her chest, valves flapping, muscles contracting. She tried to imagine
herself sitting inside one of its chambers, Nathan in the other one, just a thin membrane between them. She imagined pressing her hand to the wall, feeling his hand pressing back. If they breached that membrane, she thought, it wouldn’t kill her. It would just make her heart more open, more whole.

W
HEN WE GOT OUT OF BEN’S CAR, WE FOUND MR. AND
Mrs. Vieira by the chicken coop, shaking their heads. Feathers were everywhere. Blood, too.

One chicken was splayed open, hollowed out. Quinn ran toward it, dropped to her knees, and wailed. The autograph fell from her hand into the dirt.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Coyote,” said Mr. Vieira.

Coyotes didn’t live on the island; they had to cross the bridge to get to the farm. The image struck me as funny—it made the coyotes seem civilized, somehow, like they should be wearing little suits.

“A coyote ate Buttercup!” Quinn was beside herself. I bent down and wrapped my arms around her.

“On a farm,” said Mr. Vieira, “you learn not to name the chickens.”

“I know how you feel,” Ben whispered to Quinn. “I used to name the chickens, too.”

Quinn cried even harder. I pulled her tight, rested my chin on her warm hair.

“I hope you’ll feel better soon,” Ben said to me, but I couldn’t bring myself to look up at him.

“Thanks for taking us.” My words felt flat in my mouth. I wanted to be effusive. I wanted to say “Let’s do it again!” but I held back. I watched his blue-jeaned legs walk away, past poor eviscerated Buttercup. Strange how something so alive can be so easily reduced to feathers and skin. I wondered if any of her beautiful green eggs had been inside her when she was eaten, if they were now settling, broken, inside the coyote’s belly.

I kissed the top of Quinn’s head, then lifted the autographed flyer from the dirt and tried to smooth it out. In its short time on the ground, it had grown wrinkled and smudged.

“Do you want to go for a walk through the pear orchard?” I asked Quinn, hoping to distract her.

“The coyote might be there,” she fretted.

“We could go back to the boat,” I said.

“The coyote could be there, too,” she said. “Or the monster!”

“Quinn,” I started, but she sobbed so hard, I knew she wouldn’t hear me. She picked feathers from the ground slowly, one by one, as if she were performing some ritual, and set them on top of the flyer in my hand. A couple of the words had smeared; now it looked as if the reporter was instructing Quinn to “Shoot the Stars!”

BACK ON THE
boat, Quinn curled up in bed, feathers cupped in her palm. I put the signature in the back of the Norse mythology book to try to flatten it out.

“Maybe it wasn’t a coyote,” she said, her body rocking a little. “Maybe it was the monster that got her.”

“It was a coyote, sweetheart,” I said. “Coyotes kill chickens all the time.”

Quinn had always been practical—she had known I was the
tooth fairy, had never believed in Santa Claus. This talk of monsters was totally out of character for her.

“Why don’t you believe me?” Quinn sat up and pulled her knees to her chest. I saw all the scratches on her legs, all the mosquito bites.

“Monsters aren’t real.” I felt like a broken record. “You should know that, Quinn. You’re old enough to—”

“Eema!” Quinn scooted back against the wall, her face a spasm of fear as she pointed to the window, arm trembling.

I turned toward the glass.

“What the hell!” I jumped back, too, fell onto the bed next to Quinn, knocking my head on the paneling. An enormous eye was looking in our direction, a dark bulky head rising partly above the water.

“I told you,” Quinn said. “I told you!”

I grabbed onto Quinn as the houseboat bucked. I couldn’t make any sense of what I was seeing. It couldn’t possibly be real. Was it a movie prop? A robot? But then the huge rheumy eye looked right into me, and what robot could do that? The light swayed over us like a pendulum. All I could think was
Hold Quinn, hold Quinn, hold Quinn
, as if my arms could protect her from whatever was trying to tear our house apart.

The eye disappeared, followed by a spume of water that sounded like someone squeezing a huge fireplace bellows; some sprayed through the window screen, spattering both of us with cold wet drops. Quinn shrieked and scrunched herself into a ball, but recognition flooded my limbs.

“Oh my God.” Awe mixed with the fear in my veins. “It’s a whale. It’s a whale, Quinn.”

Quinn raised her head. “What’s a whale doing in the river?”

“It must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.” I wiped the beads of water from my face. The boat was rocking less now. I stepped over to the window and craned my head out, but the water was still, placid. A pair of herons rustled through the tule reeds, but otherwise there was no sign of life. I looked across the
slough at the great heaps of gray tree trunks and imagined the great body gliding underwater, maybe even under our boat, and felt very very small.

“Should we call the police?” she asked.

“No,” I said, looking out at the dark water. “Let this be our secret.” What could the police do, anyway? The whale would surely find its way back to the sea.

“What if it wants to hurt us?” she asked.

“Whales are peaceful.” I hoped I remembered this correctly. “If anything, it wants to play.”

“And it’s our secret.” Quinn snuggled against me, her breath still a bit ragged. Buttercup’s feathers fell from her hand, scattered over the bedspread like honeymoon rose petals.

I knew how large secrets could grow within a person; holding a whale inside would be a piece of cake.

D
EENA GENTLY PULLED KAREN’S HEADPHONES AWAY
.

“You’re on, sweetheart,” she said.

Nathan was already striding toward the ice. Karen ran to catch up. When she stepped on the ice, she immediately fell. She stood and her feet slipped out from under her again. Her hip burned where she landed; her ears roared with blood, with the murmurs of the crowd. Had she forgotten how to skate? Was it all over—could they kiss their skating dreams good-bye? A feeling rushed through her like cold water; she couldn’t tell if it was fear or relief.

“Your guards,” said Nathan. “You forgot to take off your guards.”

He kneeled down and slipped them off her blades, then stood and waved the hard plastic in the air like spoils. The audience cheered.

“They’re in our pocket now,” he whispered as he set the guards on the low wall that rimmed the rink. “Falling is the best thing you could have done.” Karen wanted to believe him, but she
felt rattled, stripped naked. She could barely feel his hand as he led her to the center of the ice.

“YOU WERE A
zombie out there.” Deena looked drained after their program. “Isolde should not be a zombie, Karen. Isolde should be buzzing with life.”

Karen could barely remember skating. Her body had done the right moves in the right order—she hadn’t stumbled, hadn’t fallen, at least not as far as she could recall—but her mind hadn’t been in it. Her heart hadn’t been in it, either; she and Nathan were still stuck inside their separate chambers there, even as he shoved his hands into her armpits, against her thighs, even as her crotch hovered just over his head. She felt dizzy, breathless, as she let her mother lead her toward the bleachers reserved for skaters awaiting their judgment. A low-rent “kiss-and-cry,” only a couple of local cameras trained upon them. She felt too blank to cry, too blank to offer up her cheek, her lips, for a kiss. She sat still and fought to keep her eyes open. When a little girl in a skating dress came over, excitedly, to deliver the next crop of fan presents, a wave of nausea barreled through Karen and she threw up all over the stuffed animals. The little girl jumped back and ran off, crying, leaving bile-soaked teddy bears on the floor. Karen let Nathan usher her out of the rink while Deena stayed behind on the bench, smiling for the cameras, waiting for their scores.