Marrow (15 page)

“Whaddoyouwanthimfor?” His sentence comes out tinny, slurred, and strung together like a party banner.

“That’s my business,” I say. “He here?”

“Nah. He’s taken a leave of absence…”

I cock my head, shift my weight from one leg to another. I am agitated. I want to snatch the glass from his hand and scream ‘
Out with it!’

“Is he sick?”

He sets down his glass and wipes his hands on a towel. “Who’s asking?”

I can’t help the smile that creeps onto my face. I try to bite it back, but, in the end, who cares?

“His bastard.”

Paul—that’s my half brother’s name—freezes. And then all of a sudden he’s polishing glasses again.

“Ah,” he says. And I wonder if everyone in the family knows about me.

“You want money?” he asks.

“Nope.”

“Then what? A reunion? Because that ain’t gonna happen.”

“I wanted to see if he was dead.”

The glass slips out of Paul’s hand. He catches it before it can meet the floor. He walks around the counter, heading toward me.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

I smile. “Tell him I said hello,” I say. “It was nice to meet you, Paul.”

He stops just short of where I’m standing. I give him one last look before I head out the door.

Mission failed, but at least I made him sick enough to take a leave of absence.

When I get back to the eating house, the box in the oven is gone. I slide down the wall until I am sitting, and squeeze my head between my knees. A leave of absence my ass.

I CAN HEAR A BABY CRYING
. I curve my way down Wessex, pulling my raincoat tighter around my body. My face is dotted with rain, and every few minutes I have to lick the water from my lips to keep it from running down my chin. The crying gets louder the closer I get to the eating house. My steps slow as I lift my head to catch its direction. It’s not at all unusual to hear an infant wailing in the Bone. The people here are conditioned to concentrate on survival rather than happiness. Parents let their babies cry while they bicker and yell; a single, ragged mother lets her baby cry so she can catch a few hours of sleep. Grandmothers let their grandchildren cry because a little crying never hurt no one. But the crying that I hear is not that of an unhappy baby; it’s the cry of a child in pain; frantic and high-pitched, it’s almost a scream.
Mo.

I can hear the asphalt beneath my shoes, the
shush shush
of the rain, and the humming of cars on the nearby highway. I try to concentrate on those sounds—sounds that are my business. But something is whispering to me; it’s a cacophony of heart, lungs, and mind, topped by the anguished screams of a baby.

I follow the cries to the crack house. Not to the door, but to a window where I can see yellow light escaping from between the drapes. I know that Mo is beneath my feet, cooking meth in the basement. That’s what he does at night. Meth which he does not use, but sells, which is probably the smartest way to go about it. Except his baby is upstairs screaming, and he can’t hear him. Maybe the baby hurt himself … Maybe…

I press my gaze between the curtains; the sliver of space doesn’t afford me much of a look around the room. I can see a bed, and for a moment I feel relief. Little Mo is not alone. His mother is kneeling among the rustled sheets, her narrow back to me, a long braid trailing down her back. Her name is Vola. She is slender and exotic, Polynesian, Mo once told me. She is always screaming at Mo, and Mo is always screaming at her. Sometimes they take their screaming to the street; Vola always has the car keys in her hand as she threatens to leave Mo for good. Mo throws her clothes on the lawn in armfuls: yellows and purples fluttering onto the weed-stricken lawn, like confetti. He screams to get the fuck out of here, and that she’s a fucking slut, and that she’s going to fucking get hers if she tries to leave him. Her response is always silence. It seems more profound than Mo’s yelling, like she’s better than his cheap, slovenly used swear words. And Mo seems to get her message, because after that he starts to yell ‘
What? You think you’re better than me, you bitch? Get out of here.’
Sometimes she leaves for a while. Goes to stay with her mother in Seattle. But the next week her car is back, and they’re groping each other in the driveway—his hand up her shirt, her grinding into him with such force it looks like she’s trying to wrestle him to the ground.

Vola is not from the Bone. You can tell. Mo met her at a bar in Seattle. None of us really know her, and she has no desire to know any of us. I tilt my head to get a better look at the bed. My breath is frosting the window. I wipe away the condensation carefully, and then steeple all ten fingers against the glass to steady myself as I lean in. Mo is playing music from the basement. It rattles the windows, but even that is not enough to drown out the cries of the baby. Maybe he’s sick. Maybe he’s…

At first I don’t understand what I am seeing. My brain takes a moment to catch up—sluggish, processing through thick confusion. And my view, so obstructed! I could be wrong. Then everything goes too fast: my breathing, my heart, my thoughts. All jumbled, slamming into each other ‘til I feel dizzy.

Vola’s head is bent over something. I watch as she lifts her hand again, and again, and again. She’s hitting something.
A pillow
, I tell myself. She had a fight with Mo, and she’s hitting a pillow. I’ve done that, exacting revenge on a pillow in the name of a school bully or my mother. Beating and beating until my knuckles were tender and my anger felt dry. But I know it’s not true, because I can’t see the baby through the slats in his crib. Vola leans back suddenly, and I can see Little Mo. He’s lying on his stomach, his head lifted, his face red from the screaming, wet from his tears. He cries so hard that he exhausts himself and stops crying, resting his head on its side and closing his eyes, his little back moving up and down as he takes big, gasping breaths.

As soon as his eyes close, Vola reaches out a hand and pinches him on the leg so hard, I flinch. His head rears up, and he starts again, his face shiny and swollen. I am frozen. I watch as Vola lifts a pillow and slams it into his head. His face bounces off the sheet, and he jerks up, his belly carrying the weight as his head and feet lift. He is shaking, and she is so calm. I don’t understand. I feel as if I am missing something, but there is nothing to miss. I am witness to something sinister. As soon as Little Mo has recovered from the pillow, Vola slaps him again, this time with so much force he rolls onto his back.

I can’t … I can’t…

I fall back from the window, gasping, my heart struggling behind my ribcage like a wounded animal. I hear a noise, and look up, trying to regulate my breathing. A crow is perched on the roof of the house just above my head. Its oiled feathers melt into the darkness of the sky, but I can see its outline, the sharpness of its curved beak. It’s looking at me, cocking its head this way then that. It caws at me as if to tell me something, then lifts its wings and flies away.

My soul reacts. It’s a deep awakening of something I thought was dead. My brain says:
You’re going to lose control. You’re going to lose control. You’re going to lose control.
And my brain may be right, but what do I care? How has keeping control ever benefitted me? Something else is speaking too. There is another voice—primitive, soft, foreign. The words don’t make sense, but then they also do.
Go, go, go.
It says.
Do, do, do.
Soul speak. I look for the crow to see what he says, but he is long gone. The longer I linger out here, the more she hurts Mo.

My heart roars.
Lub dub, lub dub.
I am at the front door.
Lub dub, lub dub, lub dub.
I test the knob.
Why is it open? Lub dub, lubdublubdub
. I step inside. Close it softly.
Lub dub, lub dub
. The baby’s car seat is abandoned on the floor, lying on its side, and her keys are on the floor next to it, like she dropped them there in a hurry. In her hurry, she forgot to lock the door—something Mo would not take kindly to. His business needed locked doors, and guns, and thugs. Where were his thugs? The house is empty.
Lubdublubdublubdub.
I walk through the kitchen. Messy counters: food, plates, cat hair. A giant spider scuttles up a bottle of vegetable oil and sits on its lid. The house smells like pot and cigarette smoke and mold. Same as the eating house, minus the pot. A steak knife covered in mayo lays on the counter.
No.
Too messy. I follow the hallway to a door I believe is Vola’s and Mo’s. I’m emotionless, calm. For a moment I stare down at the brass knob. I can see my reflection on its surface. It’s warm when my hand touches it. It’s smooth when my hand turns it. She doesn’t see me right away; she’s too focused on what she’s doing—beating the crap out of a baby.

I lunge forward as her hand is suspended mid-air. I have no plan, no choice of action. In fact, I feel as if I’m not acting at all, just watching my body from a far removed corner of the universe. I grab her braid. It’s long and thick. She’s not expecting my attack, so she starts to fall backward. Half my weight, and a foot shorter, she feels hollow and light. I yank her off the bed, her braid wrapped around my hand. She falls on her rear, her cry of surprise drowned out by the baby and the music. Her mouth is open, her eyes wide as she stares up at me. I glance up at the bed to make sure Little Mo isn’t about to roll off. His eyes are open, and he’s sucking his fist.

The sight of him trips a switch in me. I can almost hear it.
Click.
My brain suddenly stops warning me that I am going to lose control, though I do not in fact lose control. I am about as calm as I’ve ever been. A smooth river. A sleeping baby. The melody of a harp. My body moves naturally. I don’t just want to stop what’s happening. I want vengeance. The same voice that urged me in here is telling me that she needs to pay for what she was doing to Little Mo.

I drag her by her hair to the dresser, chipped and old with sharp edges. There are bottles of nail polish lined up on top of it—blues and turquoises. Vola is over her initial shock, struggling to get away from me. I wind her hair tighter around my fist and lift her knees off the ground ‘til she’s in a half-standing position. Her mouth is moving, her lips curling over words that I can’t hear. Her fists slam into my sides and stomach, anything that she can reach. She’s ineffective, a light breeze trying to move a tree. I look down in her empty eyes for long seconds, trying to drag answers out of them. No answers. She’s sick. Demented. Physically beautiful. Not worth the life she was given. A predator. A bully. I see my mother in her gray ghost irises. And then, as hard as I can, I slam her left temple into the corner of the dresser. She falls at my feet. Limp. Flesh and bones, but I took her soul.

I smile gravely, and somewhere deep, deep inside of me I know that what I am doing is not normal. I look over at the bed. Little Mo’s unfocused eyes are on me. I calmly walk to him and pick him up, holding him against my chest, rocking him side to side. “Shh,” I say. I rub his little back, kiss his temple. How long had she been doing this to him? I thought there was something wrong with him mentally, but now I know that’s not true. His unfocused eyes, the limpness of his body when you hold him, the way he doesn’t really hear your voice—it’s all her, what she’s done to him.

When he’s asleep, I lay him in his crib. There is a stool in the corner of the bedroom. I drag it over to the dresser and place it in between the wall and Vola’s body. Then I go to the closet to look for a shoe. I find a plastic flip-flop from Old Navy.

Then I go to the kitchen to find the spider. It’s on the wall above the sink, not far from the bottle of oil where I first saw it. A furrow spider. I cup it in my hands and carry it to the bedroom. I let it crawl up the wall above Vola’s body, watching it zigzag a path. I never once think about the grown-up Mo, downstairs cooking his crack. At any moment he could walk into the bedroom, but I am not afraid. I do not care about anything except the spider. When it’s almost to the ceiling, I climb onto the stool and hit it with the flip-flop, making sure to smear it across the wall. A dramatic death. Poor spider. I wipe the flip-flop clean of fingerprints, and position it in Vola’s limp hand. Then I turn the stool on its side, glance at Little Mo one last time. He sighs in his sleep, the deep and raspy sigh of someone who spent the evening crying.

I close the bedroom door softly behind me so as not to wake him, and rub my sleeve over the knob just in case. On my way out, I straighten the car seat, put the keys neatly on the kitchen counter, and lock the door from the inside.

I smile halfheartedly at the crescent moon. Some people see a thumbnail clipping, but I see a curved mouth. The moon is wicked, jealous of the sun. People do bad things in the dark, under the hollow gaze of the moon. It’s smiling at me now, proud of my sin. I’m not proud. I’m not anything. An eye for an eye, I tell myself. A beating for a beating.