Little Gods (10 page)

J is for Joy, and that's what Annabelle was for her parents, or was meant to be, or could have been. “She's a gift from God,” Annabelle's mother said when they got their newfound daughter home, but she was hesitant, trembling. She put her hands across her belly. “We—I wanted a baby so much."

From the kitchen she heard a rasp and her young husband said “She is. You did. There's just something to take care of first.” Another rasp, metal on stone, and Annabelle's mother closed her eyes. “Get it sharp,” she said. “Very sharp, so it doesn't hurt much. I'll boil some water."

Somewhere in the house, far from the green places she'd known, baby Annabelle lay on her stomach and cried.

K is for Knives. Annabelle has dim memories, masquerading as nightmares. Even at ten years old, her father has to cut her food; she can't stand to touch a knife. She doesn't like meat anyway, because it reminds her too much of her own muscles, moving under the skin. She has muscles in her back that she can flex, but they don't move anything at all.

She stares at the wall as her father saws away at the food on her plate. She can't stand to look at the knife. Or at him, wielding it.

L is for Lost things. Annabelle loses things a lot, but her father almost never does; he's only once lost anything, that she can remember. Listening from the top of the stairs, Annabelle heard him shout at her mother. “They're gone! They were wrapped in cloth and locked in the chest and now they're gone! What did you do with them?"

And her mother: “Nothing. I hated them, the way you ... brooded over them, but I wouldn't touch the things."

“Well then where did they go?"

Her mother, quietly: “Maybe they flew away."

M is for Music, and for Mystery, and this is both. Those chimes: “Ann—a—belle", ringing over the hills from the trees. They aren't birdsong, and they aren't bells, and Annabelle's parents, just a few feet away on the blanket, don't hear a thing. It is Annabelle's birthday, and she got a pink bike with a basket and a new kite to fly. The kite is in the grass, forgotten, and her bike is back at home.

Annabelle wonders if she'll be getting another gift.

N is for Normal, and some things aren't, and those things need to be cut right out. Annabelle's father knows that, and so does her mother, though it hurts her more.

Annabelle doesn't think about it. Normal is what things are, and only things that aren't what they are can be wrong.

O is for Outside, and that's Annabelle's earliest memory, of being outside, tiny in the forest, looking up at stars and pine trees. Lost. Like the baby in the rhyme, that came tumbling down when the bough broke and the cradle fell. Then came voices, and two tall people, scooping her from the forest floor, exclaiming, turning her over. Annabelle doesn't know what the memory means, but her mother sings lullabies and that's one of the voices, and her father tells stories in measured tones, and that's the other.

Sometimes Annabelle sneaks out of the house and lies down in her back yard and looks up at the sky, through the pines.

P is for Picnic, and what a wonderful idea that was. “Annabelle would love a birthday picnic,” her mother said, “and it's such a pretty day. But where should we go?"

“There's a field I know, by a nice stretch of woods,” her father said thoughtfully.

They packed the car and took Annabelle, and her new kite, to the field. Neither of her parents seemed to remember this place, though they'd often taken walks in the woods here, when they were younger. A strange cloud covers their memories, filling their heads. They'd last seen this field on a summer night like this one, exactly ten years before. They'd come to watch the butterflies.

This was before he started dipping the butterflies, wings and all, in chloroform. Before he locked them under glass.

Before (but only just before, a matter of minutes, perhaps) they found Annabelle.

Q is for Quiet, and Annabelle is that. Even the soughing of the wind has stopped, and her parents are murmuring, sipping lemonade. She can still hear the chimes if she holds her breath, but they're fading. Even the beating of her heart is enough to make her miss notes: “Ann—belle—a—belle.” Yes, the chimes are fading, and if she intends to follow them, she must do so soon.

R is for Ripping, when the knife went dull, when things weren't quite severed and man hands pulled and blood welled up, R is for the Rasp of the knife on the whetstone, but some things are too attached to be cut neatly, no matter how sharp the blade, and they tear.

S is for Scars. Annabelle has two on her back, shiny and wide, running vertically down her shoulder blades. Her mother told her that she stumbled and fell on a board with nails in it, and that's where the scars come from. Her father told her she was scratched by a dog when she was a baby, and that's where she got them. Sometimes her muscles spasm beneath the scars. And often in the morning, after a dream of flying, her shoulders ache.

T is for Time, and Annabelle feels it shortening and shortening as the shadows lengthen and the sun slides west.

U is for Umbilicus, the first connection between mother and daughter, which leaves its mark on the child's belly forever. But Annabelle has no navel, her stomach is as smooth as the skin of a peach, unmarked and untouched. Annabelle's mother thinks sometimes of umbilical cords being cut with scissors, of that fundamental severance, which she and Annabelle never had. Instead of scissors, there was a knife, and it wasn't a cord that was cut, not the connection between mother and daughter that was severed, but a different connection altogether.

And now Annabelle is in the field on her birthday, and it seems that while some connections must remain sundered forever, others can be rejoined.

V is for Vigilant, and Annabelle's mother is that, she always keeps an eye out for her daughter. She can't have more children, that thought is always on top of her mind, and she rarely lets Annabelle out of her sight. But now her attention wanders, she even forgets Annabelle for a moment, the thoughts fly out of her head and she's back in her girlhood, laughing with her new husband. Laughing, before Annabelle, and knives, and grisly silky mementos that mysteriously disappear, just as Annabelle is now disappearing over the hills toward the forest.

W is for Worried, and Annabelle knows her parents will be, but the chiming is louder now, a part of her is calling her and that's more important than anything, and she runs across the fields into the trees, the song in her head like her own voice, her own song, calling her home, and as she runs she can almost feel herself flying.

X is for Xenophobia, the hate of the stranger, and Annabelle doesn't know that word, and neither does her mother, and while her father does know it, he would never ascribe it to himself.

Yet his daughter is a stranger, and his wife also in many ways, and himself most of all, and he hates them all, really. When he sits in the basement tearing the wings from butterflies and remembering the night they found Annabelle, hate fills him. You can't turn something into something it's not, he thinks at the picnic, looking at the fat clouds float effortlessly by. Flying.

And then his wife says “Where's Annabelle?” and things happen very fast.

Y is for Yell, which Annabelle's mother does, she stands on the blanket and shouts her daughter's name. Her husband stands, frowning, hands clenched on a napkin that he rips in half, and they both shout for their daughter, who is gone, gone, and they look for the flutter of a blue dress, for curly red hair, but there's nothing, not even in the trees, there's only

Z is for Zephyr, the gentle west wind, coming up suddenly strong over the field from the trees, blowing into the shouting faces of Annabelle's mother and father, but only the wind answers them, blowing as though buffeted by a million wings and then, like apple blossoms blowing free, like silk streamers in the air, a hundred thousand sunset red and golden butterflies burst from the trees in the forest, flying.

And after it all Annabelle knows she is not a worm, or an angel, or a flower. She is something else, something of the green, something like a butterfly that lost its wings but, after a time, regained them.

The Scent of Copper Pennies

When she came into the coffee shop, I didn't know she was the woman who would change my life. She wore black, she had a beautiful face—that's all I noticed when she came in and walked to the counter to order a drink.

I drank Guinness for the warmth, sitting at a round table in the far corner of the coffee shop. I spent a lot of time there, but no one knew my name. Most of the people who frequented the place were hip beyond words, all tattoos and esoterica. I didn't know the bands they liked, the bars they went to, the world they inhabited.

I had a book in front of me, though it was closed for the moment, with a long coffee spoon as a bookmark. It was a collection of the year's best essays. The book had no central subject, no overriding theme—diversity was the point. I wanted to broaden my horizons, so I'd be a more interesting person. Not that I talked to many people. Sometimes I went days without speaking to anyone but co-workers and waitresses.

I got a better look at the woman as she took her drink away from the counter. My old girlfriend Charlotte had been pretty, too, but in a taller, brasher, blonder way. This woman had gray eyes, and she wore her dark hair piled atop her head. She wore knee high boots, tights, a loose skirt, and a spaghetti-strap velvet top, all black. A fringed shawl hung loosely over her shoulders. Her skin wasn't dead-white pale, and she didn't wear heavy eye-shadow or silver jewelry, none of the trappings I associated with goth types. She seemed comfortable in her clothes, as if they weren't a fashion statement but a simple fact of her being: this woman wears black.

She caught me staring and I looked away after meeting her eyes for an instant. I fidgeted with my napkin, where a splash of Guinness had soaked into the paper.

She sat down across from me, putting her cup beside my pint glass. Her drink smelled wonderful, some sort of spiced tea.

“Hello,” she said. “I'm Merrilee."

I looked up. I'm a shy person, I always have been, I never know what to say. But how often had I imagined a moment like this? The way it is in the movies, when a stranger sits down at your table and introduces herself, and it's a chance for your life to take a strange turning. A chance that shouldn't be passed up, a chance at the extraordinary.

But I try not to be so obsessive.

“Mike,” I said, but I've never liked the short-form. “Michael."

“We could go anywhere from here,” she said, stirring her cup, scented steam rising. There was cinnamon in there, and nutmeg, and I don't know what else. I wondered how much of the delicious smell was the tea and how much was her, then felt foolish for thinking such a thing. “Two strangers,” she said, “no history, no past, we've never met before. This could be a conversation, it could be an awkward silence, it could be a love affair, a friendship, a rivalry. So much possibility. Wonderful, isn't it?"

She smiled, not showing her teeth. The only makeup she wore was lipstick, just a touch of dark red. “It is,” I said. “Wonderful, I mean.” I wanted to say something that wasn't empty, because this was a moment teetering. It could go any way at all, she'd said as much. I was still thinking about the smell of her tea, perhaps because that was easier than thinking about her and her words ("it could be a love affair"), and when I spoke, the words had nothing to do with anything, they were just something from one of the books I had read recently. “Did you know, in voodoo, the gods don't appear as burning bushes or golden showers or swans, nothing like that. They usually manifest as smells, or sounds..."

“Or sensations, touches,” she said, and sipped her tea. “They're more intimate gods, aren't they? They don't play well on television, they don't always make for such dramatic stories.” She looked at the ceiling for a moment, at the plaster painted with clouds and fat little cherubs in a chorus-line. “But if you had to die, and be held by something, I'd rather it be the touch of feathers and the smell of cinnamon than a raging bull or a pillar of fire.” She looked at me over the rim of her cup, inhaling the steam.

This was a conversation, I'd had them before, but I couldn't think of anything except her beauty and my awkwardness and the fact that I hadn't touched a woman since Charlotte, and that had been a year ago and a dozen states away.

“You want the love affair,” she said. One of the dark hairs (not black, but a rich, deep brown) piled on her head came loose, falling across her forehead. “And you're an attractive person. It's not impossible. But what I like about you ... is the way you blend in."

I looked down, sure I was being teased now, though her voice hadn't changed. “I've always been a wallflower,” I said, trying to make it light.

“No, no. That's not what I mean. I mean ... if there were vengeful ghosts, searching for you, they wouldn't see you at all, would they? They'd overlook you and go another way, down some other forking path. There's a voodoo god, the god of the crossroads. He smells of copper pennies and ... and motor oil, I think. He's a god of choices made, and choices missed. Every moment could be anything ... even your last one."

She'd lost me. If another woman, one less breathtaking, had sat down at my table and started saying things like this, I would have excused myself politely. Maybe I was just shallow, hoping to get laid, even if she was crazy. Being lonely can screw up your priorities. But she didn't seem like a flake, and I couldn't help thinking that the things she said made some kind of secret sense, a sense I'd appreciate if I could only penetrate the mystery.

I said “You don't blend in, though. You say that like it's an admirable thing."

She cocked her head and nodded. She drank her tea in a gulp and put the cup down. “Will you walk with me?"

I only hesitated a second before nodding.

We left together. No one called her name, which surprised me. She seemed like the type who'd get noticed in a place like this, who'd have lots of friends.

“Have you lived in Santa Cruz for long?” she asked, walking with me down Cedar Street.