Emerald City (9 page)

They’re late. The rest of the group mills restlessly near the shore, turning to check on their progress across the sand. The models’
faces look ghostly in this bloodless morning sun. They will probably guess, thinks Bernadette. She hopes they do.

“It’s strange,” she says. “Going back.”

“To them?” Jann gestures at the group. “Or back?”

“Both,” she says.

Later today they will fly to Nairobi. Tomorrow morning, New York. Two weeks from now she leaves for Argentina.

“Everything fades the minute you’re somewhere else,” Bernadette says. It’s a mistake to say these things. “It fades.”

Jann switches his camera case from one shoulder to the other. The stubble of his beard glints with perspiration.

“Some things have to last,” he says, grinning at her, “or there’d be nothing but pictures you styled and I shot.”

Hair and Makeup are waving. The others stamp the sand with mock impatience. It is too soft to make a sound.

“They’re not enough,” says Bernadette.

“No,” says Jann. “They’re not.”

She tries to catch his eye, but he is hurrying. He said it once, she thinks. But she cannot let the conversation go. “It’s not enough,” she says again.

They reach the group. Everyone eyes them alertly. Bernadette enjoys this attention in a shameless, childish way she cannot remember feeling since high school. There is something exquisite in being wondered about.

The first shot is of Alice. She wears a black one-piece, skimpy, woven with gold threads. It is Bernadette’s favorite.

“Better on you than on me,” she says, snipping a loose thread. The girl’s breasts are so small that Bernadette must pin the suit in back. Alice doesn’t smile. Her eyes are funny today, as though she hadn’t slept.

Nick, the makeup man, can’t put enough shadow on. “You’re puffy,” he tells her, adding mascara.

“Puffy.” Bernadette snorts. “Wait twenty years.”

When Nick is satisfied, Alice goes to the water’s edge. The two other models flank her, their backs to the camera. Alice extends her arms slightly from the shoulders, a ballet pose. As Jann begins to shoot, she raises them slowly. Bernadette stands beside Jann. She sees a thin child, a body barely settled in its first frail curves. There is something yielding in the girl’s face, something easily wounded. She is looking at Jann.

“More eyes,” he says. “Make them harder.”

The girl lifts her chin, sharpening the thin line of her jaw. Her eyes are bright and narrow. She looks at Jann and Bernadette with the sad, fierce look of someone who sees a thing she knows she cannot have.

Jann is excited. “Kiddo! You’ve got it,” he cries.

She does, Bernadette thinks. In three years she will probably be famous. She will hardly remember Lamu, and if she runs across pictures of herself on this beach, she’ll wonder who took them.

When the shot is done, Alice wanders to the water and begins to wade. She still wears the black bathing suit, and standing alone she looks like a teenager about to dive in. After dressing the other models, Bernadette follows. She and Alice wade together in silence.

“I want to go home,” Alice says. Her eyes are red.

“Twenty-four hours,” says Bernadette.

“I mean home home.”

“Rockford, Illinois?”

The girl nods. “I’m lonely,” she says.

It’s amazing, thinks Bernadette, how the young can just say these things. How easy it is.

“We’re in Africa,” she tells the girl.

Alice shrugs and looks at the shore. Oddly shaped trees rise from behind the dunes. Jann is shooting again. The other models lie stretched on the sand.

“Home never looks so good as when you’re in Africa,” Bernadette says.

Alice turns to her, squinting in the glare. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you can go home whenever you want,” Bernadette says. “No one’s stopping you.”

The girl fixes her distracted eyes on the horizon. The water looks thick as molten silver. It feels warm against Bernadette’s thighs.

“And then you’ll be home,” Bernadette says.

Alice dips her fingers into the water and paints wet streaks along her arm. She looks disappointed, as if she had expected to hear something else.

“But now that you’ve had a taste,” says Bernadette, “you probably won’t.”

She feels a moment of pride in the way she has led her own life. I didn’t go home, she thinks.

“I bet I won’t,” Alice says.

Something relaxes around the girl’s mouth. She looks relieved. It is hard to pass up an extraordinary life.

“Anyway,” says Bernadette, “I can cheer you up a little.”

Alice shrugs, clinging to her gloom. She is, after all, a teenager.

“That shot we just did—that one of you?” Bernadette says. “That was the cover.”

The girl runs a hand through her hair. Her lips part, and her eyes fill with tears. She is trying not to smile.

They turn at the sound of voices. Jann jogs toward them with Nick in tow. They have finished the shot.

“I want to get one of you,” Jann says to Bernadette. “I’ll make you a copy.”

Bernadette glances at Alice. The girl has turned away, and her wet hands dangle at her sides.

“Us three,” says Bernadette.

Jann hands the camera to Nick. He goes to Bernadette’s side, and she stands between him and the girl, one arm around each. She can feel the bones of Alice’s shoulders, fragile and warm as a bird’s. She brushes a few stray hairs from the girl’s face.

“Smile,” says Nick.

There is a stillness, the pause of a moment being sealed. Bernadette notices the breeze, the limp water washing her toes. She feels an ache of nostalgia. Jann’s hand presses against her back. Between them all is a fragile weave of threads, a spider’s web. Bernadette longs for this moment as if it had already passed, as if it could have been. Yet here it is.

My brother builds models for a hobby. From plastic pieces he makes ships and airplanes, racing cars, those see-through human bodies where you put in the heart and stomach and things. I arrange the pieces for him. For years we’ve had the same quiet days: lawn mower sounds, children laughing on our neighbors’ lawns, faint noises of TV from where Dad sits alone in his study watching a game. Every year the models get more complicated.

Six years ago, when Bradley was ten years old and I was seven, our mother started the car to take us shopping. After backing out of the garage, she remembered her grocery coupons. We stayed in the car, engine running, while she went inside to get them. It was a hot day, one of those afternoons when bits of white fluff fill up the air
and under everything you hear beating locusts. That’s how I think of it now, anyway.

Bradley sat in front. While our mother was gone, he slid over and started fooling around at the wheel, making believe he was driving. The electric door to the garage was shut. When our mother came back with her coupon book, she walked through the space between the garage door and the front of the car to get to her side. She was in a hurry. She had on a straw hat, and her hair flopped out the front. Maybe because of that hat she couldn’t see Bradley. Maybe she saw him and thought it was safe to walk there.

The car jerked forward and hit the door. You wouldn’t think a person could be so hurt from a thing like that, but they said she had bleeding inside her. Sometimes I stare at those plastic human models in Bradley’s room with all their different parts and wonder which parts of her bled.

I remember my mother like you remember a good, long dream you had. I see a beautiful shadow leaning down, maybe over the edge of my crib. I remember her singing a lot, silly songs when she dried me after a bath about friendly vegetables and farm animals speaking in rhyme. She was in the church choir, and we would walk there together through the snow on mornings when the sun was so bright I had to keep my eyes closed. I held her hand, and she guided me over the ice.

There’s one time I remember most, like that part of a dream that keeps coming back. She was leaving for the airport, dressed up in nice shoes and panty hose, and I was riding my trike. I must have been four years old. As she walked toward the car, I rode behind her, pedaling faster and faster until I hit her ankle and tore the stocking and made her bleed. It wasn’t an accident. I knew what would happen, but I couldn’t believe it. I kept pedaling.

I remember the look on her face when she turned and saw me behind her. Her mouth opened, and she stood touching her hair for a minute. Then she leaned down and put her hand on the bloody cut. I cried like I’d been hit myself. When I think of that now, I still want to.

With Bradley in the car, maybe it was like that. I think about it.

Bradley likes doing things that are dangerous. Stunts, I mean. He’s raced motorcycles and jumped from a plane in a parachute. He’s run along the top of a train, hang-glided, sailed alone on Lake Michigan when a storm was due. I watched all of it. There’s a secret we don’t need to say out loud: having me there keeps him safe. I keep my eyes on Brad no matter how far away he goes, and I hold him in place. It’s a talent of mine, I guess. A kind of magic. When our mother walked through that space, maybe I looked the wrong way.

The Belsons are coming to our house for a barbecue, and I’m making a pie with Peggy, our stepmother since last year. Outside the kitchen window Bradley pushes my stepsisters, Sheila and Meg, on the tire swing. Peggy keeps looking out there like she’s nervous. Dad’s beside her, chopping onions for burgers.

“He’s pushing them awfully hard,” Peggy says.

Dad looks out and so do I. Sheila and Meg are six and seven years old, Peggy’s daughters from her first marriage. Dad smiles. “Brad’s good with kids,” he says, kneading the chopped meat.

“That’s not what I said.”

Dad is quiet. I stare at my blob of crust. “What do you want me to do?” he says.

Peggy laughs. “Nothing, I guess.” She dumps her flour and
sugar mix over a pile of apple slices. “If I have to tell you, then nothing.”

She sticks her hands in the bowl and starts tossing the ingredients. Her wedding ring cracks against the glass. Dad’s hands are still, covered with bits of meat. He’s watching Brad. “I trust his judgment,” he says, but he sounds sad.

“Me, too,” I add.

Peggy looks from one of us to the other and then out the window again. She shakes her head. I hate her at that moment.

As I roll out the pie dough, I hear that heavy thump of a person’s whole weight falling. Sheila lies on the ground under the tire swing. Meg is still holding on to it, looking stunned. Nothing moves for a second but the tire, which sails back and forth, creaking on its rope. Then Peggy runs outside, scattering butter and juice, and bends down over Sheila.

Dad runs after her. He’s a big man, gentle most of the time. But today his face goes red and his eyes look small and fierce as an elephant’s. He takes Brad by the shoulders and shakes him hard. “Godammit!” he says. “When Peggy trusts you with those kids …”

“Stop it!” I shout from the kitchen.

Dad looks helpless and clumsy inside his body. He gives Brad a shove that knocks him backward onto the grass. Then Dad pauses, like he doesn’t know what to do. As Bradley gets to his feet, Dad reaches down to help, but stops halfway. He comes back to the kitchen and pounds both his fists into the hamburger meat.

Sheila sits on the counter, sniffling, while her mother wipes Bactine on her skinned knee. Dad shakes his head. “It was an accident, okay?”

Peggy doesn’t answer. She leans close to Sheila’s knee and swabs it with a cotton ball.

“I’m saying he didn’t mean it,” Dad says.

“Of course he didn’t.”

Dad watches her and Sheila, like something is still not settled.

“I just saw it coming,” Peggy says.

Sheila parades her skinned knee with its bandage and orange stain for the Belson girls, who are close to her age. Peggy lays our pie in the oven, and Dad puts on his goofy chef’s hat as soon as the coals are hot enough for grilling. He and Neil Belson each sip a Beck’s and argue over whether the Cubs will make it to the World Series.

I lean against Dad’s arm. He has big, solid arms that make you safe when he hugs you, like you’re inside a house with its front and back doors locked. “Well, look at you, miss,” he says, pressing a spatula down on the spitting meat. “This one’s got my heart,” he tells Neil Belson, raising his Beck’s. “Forever and always.”

They both laugh. “Who could blame you?” Mr. Belson says. I pretend to rub smoke from my eyes, embarrassed.

Sometimes I feel like the simplest things I do—chew gum, cartwheel across the lawn, even bite my nails, which I’m trying to quitfill Dad up with happiness. His eyes get soft, and I know no matter what I ask, he’ll say yes in a minute.

“Do me a favor, baby?” he says. “Use your magic to cheer up your big brother?”

I try to. I offer Bradley my pickle and bites of my burger, even though he already has one. I tell him a few dead baby jokes, which are the only kind I can remember. But he bites his lips and stares at his hands like he’s trying to figure something out.

“Is Bradley feeling okay?” Celia Belson asks Peggy during lunch. Peggy leans over and whispers to her. They give each other a
look that surprises me, like they both know something they don’t need to talk about.

“How about a game of softball?” Dad says, wrapping his arms around me from behind and speaking to the group. He has a good, warm smell of beer and bread. Dad likes games: football, soccer, Parcheesi. Tic-tac-toe if there’s nothing else. Our mom did, too, and when she was alive they’d play gin rummy late into the night.

Brad says he’ll sit out.

“C’mon, Brad,” Dad coaxes. “We need your power hitting.” He wants to make up but doesn’t know how. His hands hang at his sides.

“No thanks,” Bradley says. “Really.”

I catch another fast look between Peggy and Celia. Brad sees it, too.

I sit out with him. I watch the rest of them play, and Bradley tears blades of grass in two and piles the pieces at his feet. Everything is wrong: Dad’s shoulders droop as he stands at first base. Peggy scowls while waiting her turn to bat. Celia Belson keeps glancing over at us. I stare at each one of them the way I stare at Brad when he’s doing a stunt. But nothing improves.