Family (9 page)

i cannot not ask.

i need to know what it is that has shelly so blank, so fully distracted. she is cracking, crumbling, and there should be no secrets among
family
, i reason. not
our
family.

so. i venture:

“what is it?”

shelly’s cheeks flush, pink bloom creeping up toward her temples like a rash, but her gaze doesn’t leave the road. “you can tell?”

“of course.”

of
course
. of course i can. she is me. she is my shadow-self. i
know
.

“it’s—” she falters, pressing her lips together until they are little more than a thin white line. her cheekbones set into sharp angles, hollow and haunted.

i place a hand against her knee, reassuring her. she can say anything to me, i remind her. she
is
me.

she nods, almost to herself, winds her arms and runs the steering wheel all the way to the right, driving us off to the side of the road, to a soft shoulder, where we finally settle.

the engine sputters and the truck falls silent.

she turns to me, her face a jigsaw puzzle that’s been forced together incorrectly, tabs jutting from too-tight cutouts.

“i’m going to have a baby.”

there is a hitch, a hiccup, and a trapdoor opens at the base of my stomach.

she is pregnant.

shelly is
pregnant
.

i soar downward, into the vortex where the floor has given way beneath me.

this. is incomprehensible.

i am overwhelmed.

overjoyed.

shelly is pregnant.

i am overjoyed.

shelly is growing a new life inside of her. her body is a safe house,

a haven.

our family will have a new baby.

our sisters will be mothers.

and Henry will always be our father.

this baby, the very fact of it—

it means that the fabric of our family is now that much more firmly woven, that much more inextricable. the surface of our puzzle pieces have been brushed with glue.

we are bound.

eternal.

infinite.

my eyes shine. i scrabble across the seat, clutch shelly tightly. her body feels rigid against my own.

i understand: she is afraid.

she is not the first of our sisters to give birth on the ranch, not hardly, but she is the sister who is my own second skin.

her fear is natural. but this news, this new life—it is something to celebrate.

of this, i am certain.

and so, i tell her so: “you aren’t alone. this baby is all of ours.”

there is no ego, no i, no before, i remind her. no parents. just us: the family. infinity, and love, and binding. the sins of the fathers have been washed from the slate. we are clean, scrubbed and fresh. we, our
family—
we can create our own
now
. a
now
for the baby.

shelly’s baby. all of ours.

it is a miracle.

i never did believe in heaven, and yet.

it
is
.

a miracle.

she hears me, allows my thrill to shower her. i can see that she hears me.

a clarity comes over those storm-cloud eyes.

she takes a breath, nods. “i’m not worried; that’s not the right word.

it’s just, i can’t”—

she bites at her lip—

“the father could be anyone.

junior, Henry… or someone else.

it could be anyone else from the ranch.”

she looks ashamed, looks the way i sometimes felt after a visit with uncle jack—

like a nuclear rain shower couldn’t begin

to undo the stains.

but why? because the baby could be anyone’s?

as though that even mattered.

as though that weren’t the entire point of our life, together, on the ranch.

our
family
.

“but we are all
one
family,” i insist.

“we are
all
Henry’s children, wives, and sisters. everything—
everyone
—belongs to everybody.”

“true.”

though she still sounds uncertain, my enthusiasm must have leaked, spilled over past the edges of her body’s boundaries. she hazards a hopeful grin. reaches out, clasps her fingers around my own.

“we can do this,” she offers, more as a question than a statement.

“Henry—He has connections, contacts.

there’s a man He met, sometime back,

a music manager.

someone important.

this guy’s gonna come out, hear us sing, take a listen to Henry’s stuff.

help us get the message out.”

i nod, knowing:

Henry’s reach, His grasp, is far.

His orbit is infinite.

His connections like sticky spider-webbing.

“it’s gonna mean money,” shelly goes on. “for the baby. for our
family
.”

i blink.

money.

of course,

babies—

people—

families—

cost

money.

we live so well on cast-offs,

on
trash.

that i had nearly forgotten about

such real-world things.

things like

money
.

i have a moment,

a hiccup,

where the soft spaces of my throat seem to tighten, to close.

where mirror-mel awakens,

wide-eyed,

wondering:

wondering:

what ever happened

to free love?

but mirror-mel

should know better

than to question Henry.

“we can do this,” shelly says again,

and the choking,

closing

sensation

melts away.

i turn to shelly.

my
sister.

soon to be a
mother
.

i nod, utterly convinced.

“of course we can.

we
will
.

“we’re
family
.”

Henry says, there is no
before
, and He is right.

He knows. everything. sees right through people like they’re cut from glass, His eyes the prism of a psychic kaleidoscope: telepathic, all-knowing.

infinite.

i have no
before
, no memory of what it was to have a father.

no memory of life before the undertow, before eternity overtook me.

before
infinity.

but.

there is one thought,

one mind-image,

one flash of consciousness that can’t be erased,

no matter the cloudy bursts i breathe in,

no matter how my lungs fill of Henry’s medicine,

of magic smoke

that i suck down

into the empty, decaying base of my body:

there is the day that i met my uncle.

jack.

i was small.

i was small, and my father only ever a pencil tracing, a paper cutout, a shadow of a concept that my mother whispered to herself

in those moments that she happened to forget herself.

to forget
me.

my father was, near as i could tell, a wisp of an afterthought,

a fleeting prayer, mumbled incoherently.

a suggestion of a sketch, buried deep within the footnotes of my mother’s life plan.

mother wasn’t one for planning. and so. i never had a father.

only uncle jack.

“mel,” mother said, leaning forward. the heavy vapors of her scent clogged and clotted at the back of my throat, choking me off, strangling me
.

“this is jack. he’s going to stay with us for a while.”

and the look in his eyes—

a gleam that suggested that he understood the depths of my own transparency—

that was enough,
more
than enough, to still a girl my age,

then barely five years old.

“you can call me uncle.”

his breath reeked of alcohol and secrets.

of rot and undertow

and promises

unfulfilled.

i knew:

there was something about a girl who hadn’t ever known her father;

there were words for that fractured outline of a person, words hurled at me by playground passersby, people who couldn’t possibly have grasped the strength of the cloying showers of hatred they spewed.

i was small, still. barely five years old.

i was something dirty. undeserving.

something barely of this world.

i understood, even then, what it was to be lacking.

what it was to have a gaping, yawning hole—a chasm where one’s
family
should be.

it was a

punch line

that for once, i was in on.

even then.

even small.

there was something about a girl who didn’t have a father.

something rotted,

set to

spoil.

uncle jack wasn’t going to change that.

he had his own empty places.

hollow spaces.

and it was clear to me,

even then,

even small,

that he

had

his own plans

to fill

those fault lines

up.

when shelly and i return home with the fruits of our foraging, leila is in the kitchen.

lately, leila is often in the kitchen.

and i often like to stay away from leila.

lately.

lately, i stay

away.

lately, she and junior tilt their heads together, exchange glances like their insides are radios tuned to the same frequency.

lately, there are whispers, conversational lilts that ring like hushed, muffled music.

there are revved engines, lately,

and headlights that wash over the charred remains of our campfire hours after we’ve snuffed the flames and headed off to sleep.

it is… unsettling.

so.

lately, i stay away from leila as best i can.

which means staying out of the kitchen.

it is wrong, i know, to avoid her. to avoid junior.

they are, both of them,

my
family
.

but.

i am not the only one grappling with uncertainty.

i think back to shelly’s delicate trembling,

her hesitation

back in the pickup

.

there is a certain amount of

uncertainty.

even here, among Henry’s watersheds, His bottomless caches of love and light.

even here, there are moments of doubt,

of afterthought

and undertow.

it may be wrong, but regardless:

it is fierce.

deep.

inescapable.

leila bares her teeth.

when shelly and i enter the kitchen, arms bowing under the weight of our bounty, there is a moment—

a slight,

nearly imperceptible,

sliver of a second—

that leila’s teeth are exposed:

white,

the shade of sun-bleached bone.

her face is an expansive mask of hunger.

her angles have been sharpened to precision.

i think of shelly, of her soft vulnerability,

of the extra heartbeat that pulses

through the road maps of her body.

we exchange a glance—

shelly,

my
sister
,

and i—

a moment of mutual transparency—

and come to a tacit agreement.

she shuffles the grocery bags against her hips,

gives no hint of the other cargo

she totes.

the baby is our secret.

it may belong to our family—

to all of us—

but for now, it is still

our secret.

leila is dressed in black:

black jeans, black boots, slim black turtleneck pulled over her taut, slender frame.

she is a spring-loaded coil, coated in ink. she is slick, she is thick, she is heavy with sinister expectation.

she is the execution of a plot, a plan.

a threat.

hollow need hangs from her.

want
drips from her limbs, caresses her joints, pools within her crevasses, her cracks, her rivulets.

she brims, bursts,

overflows with
now
.

her half-life is sticky; it rains nuclear showers against all of our twisted, crooked, creaking shoulders.

leila has claws. and fangs.

leila is something fierce.

she is darkness, from the tips of her eyelashes to the jagged, ragged edges of her pinky toenails.

she is a shadow. a cipher. she is the opposite of matter.

she is ready.

leila is chaos.

we are
all—

junior

shelly

leila

me—

we are
all

.

we are all driven by the undertow.

leila sits beside junior in the front seat of the car, her head, as ever, tilted toward him, their collective consciousness emitting

on her lap she holds a sack,

once pristine white,

now frayed and filthy.

full.

shelly bounces beside me in the backseat, eyes round and wide, humming, thrumming, vibrating. she is tuned out, tuned
in
to leila and junior, to the crackling, crashing sounds that call to us from the front of the car.

“it’s time,” junior explains, from behind the steering wheel.

“Henry says: it’s time.”

junior is:

rudderless.

but.

junior is:

driven.

and i am:

carried along.

upswept.

adrift.

alone.

alongside

my family.

clatters and clangs emerge from leila’s bag as our car barrels down the road, away from death valley,

moving steadily along toward the canyons, the fissures, the

of the city of angels.