Precious (11 page)

She once rode a donkey.

She once had a noose around her neck.

She died once—at least—and found her life again.

And, after recalling this, Natalia took in a sharp, involuntary breath.

She felt, in response, a pull on her sweater and looked down to see Sissy’s fingers—the shape of them squarer than hers, the child who was destined to have her father’s body. “Mom,” Sissy said again. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Natalia said, recomposing herself. “The dishes. They need to be done even if no one wants to do them.” She started in again on the breakfast plates. Without turning, she said, “The thing about stories is how one leads to another. How about you tell me a story instead. You tell me a story you remember, while I wash and dry.”

Sissy finished eating her sandwich and thought on things her mother had said, stories her mother had told. But it happened—as it so often did—that Sissy could not call upon a single story when under the pressure of request. Even her mother’s stories would never be her own. After a few moments her mother turned, and seeing the thin impatience
she wore, Sissy’s face scrunched up more. She gnawed the inside of her cheek until she tasted coppery blood and until her mother, noticing, said, “Jesus, Sissy, don’t be a cannibal. I only asked for a story, not blood.”

“I don’t know any.”

Natalia’s lips went straight. There was a fleeting moment when she was assailed by the thought that if she left, the stories, too, would leave, and eventually there would be nothing left of her in this house at all. “What do you mean, you don’t know any stories? None? I must have told you hundreds, thousands of stories. Don’t tell me you don’t know. Don’t tell me you watch so much television your brain is a turnip.”

Sissy tried, beginning a familiar refrain and giving in to the moment to inspire her, to open her mouth and pour out a story—one uncomplicated and fluid—and yet, with her mother standing there, dishrag still in hand, her face expectant, time seemed to eke by, and there was, in the place of a story, silence. She began again. She told her mother something she would later forget.

Natalia listened until Sissy finished. She rinsed a dish, set it in the rack. She squeezed the rag. She checked the clock again. “It’s time to get ready to go to Milly’s. A few hours, maybe more.”

“That’s too long.”

“Time’s relative,” Natalia said. “And besides, it wasn’t a request.”

“She smells like VapoRub. She has a stuffed cat in her living room that’s a hundred years old and
a fish
hanging on her shed.” She made a face. “She and Mr. Morris kiss
all the time.”

“They’re happy,” Natalia said, shrugging. “Mr. Morris plays with you. I saw him pull a quarter from your ear.”

“He’s crazy,” Sissy said, but she smiled thinking about Mr. Morris and how kind he was.

“It’s settled, then.”

Sissy sat up straighter, kinked her neck again, remembered to enunciate. She said, “No, it’s not settled. I
would rather
not go. I
would rather
be with you instead. I don’t want to be alone.”

“You won’t be alone. You’ll be with Mr. and Mrs. Morris.” “Same thing,” Sissy said. “Mostly. Mr. Morris will probably be out playing golf with his friends. I’ll be alone.”

Natalia came over to where Sissy sat and bent down, and Sissy noticed her mother had plucked her eyebrows so thin that they looked like line drawings. She smelled that day of spice, a hint of vanilla. She pushed her hair back over her shoulder. “I love you. I love Eva, too, and your father. But the truth is, Sissy, you should never imagine a life where you couldn’t bear being alone. Eventually, we’re all alone. It happens to everyone at some point, whether we want it to or not.”

Sunday is Frank Kisch’s day off, and the morning is his favorite time. It is the stillness of morning that most agrees with him—its utter and succinct compliance before things set to spinning kinesthetic motion. Soon the girls will rise and take to bickering over who will wash and who will dry the breakfast dishes, Sissy on a stool smashing the sudsy water with her hands, tormenting Eva, who stands next to her, grousing about getting wet, sometimes even going so far as to push Sissy from her stool. Their arguing manages always to escalate to the point where Frank himself must intervene in a crashing crescendo—there is no one else to keep them in line, though he wishes Eva would be more mature and accept responsibility around the house and with Sissy. And then the girls will take to a stony silence, and Frank will yell more, even when he does not wish to. At forty-two, he is a bulk of a man—thick black hair, long sideburns, a strong body, broad nose and forehead, his eyes coppery like new oil. His voice booms when he’s angry, suddenly charging
the air and frightening both his girls, frightening even himself sometimes, reminding himself of his own father, which is almost the last thing he wishes to be reminded of at all. Beyond the girls, beyond the house, people know him to be dependable, the person to call when the car light goes on, or when the water heater fails to climb to the necessary temperature. He is liked well enough, perhaps more liked than Natalia, for it seems that neighbors might forgive a man with a temper but not forgive a woman who refuses to gossip. “People,” Natalia once said after she tried her first potluck and Parcheesi dinner, “drain you with questions. Did you hear that woman, Stacy, ask why we didn’t keep trying until we had a boy? What right did she have to say that, with two boys of her own?”

“She didn’t mean it the way you took it,” he told her. “And all people want is friendship.” He was surprised when she huffed irritably in response.

He doesn’t know what anyone wants, really. He never did understand what Natalia wanted, or the girls.

When he yells, Eva will not look at him, and he feels her accusations, along with his regret. The girls hush themselves midsentence when he walks into the room and then resume where they left off when he leaves. In the Kisch house, it often seems there is a battle of wills, a constant tension. When there should be order and obedience, a proper show of respect, there is chaos. Now, since Natalia has been gone, this is especially true. He looks at his girls—Eva, who is so much like a woman, and Sissy, who is so flighty—and they each seem to require a delicacy he lacks. When he cannot think of what to say, when they stare at him blankly, he goes outside and works on the grass, or on his car, a beautifully restored Chevy.

Sitting in silence outside on his front steps in the early-morning hours is Frank Kisch’s church and religion. A quiet hum settles on the tree branches and rooftops and electrical wires.

This Sunday, though, when he steps outside to the glare and warmth of the summer morning, he finds Ginny Anderson sitting on
the steps, three used cigarettes already at her sandaled feet, pressed against the sidewalk.

“Ginny,” he says, still holding open the screen door. He sips his coffee, waits for her to turn, but she only stumps out another butt and exhales. Out earlier than usual, the dog across the street barks, perhaps at him. “How are you? I was worried.”

“I know you called,” she says, turning. “I’m sorry.”

“You have a lot on your mind.” He sees the lines of worry, her normally fine hair unwashed, her eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, or booze, or both. Still, he wishes he might do something for her, ease her burden in some way, as she did his in the months of Natalia’s absence, telling him that it would be okay, that she’d come back because people do come back, because sometimes people regret things and change.

“I had to get out of the house,” she says.

“I’m glad you came.”

She turns away then, looks across the street. “Yappy dog,” she says.

“The yappiest.”

“I figured you’d be up already.”

“I’ve been up. You should have knocked.”

“It was early. It’s still early. I didn’t want to wake you.”

“You didn’t wake me,” he says.

She doesn’t look at him again, though he wishes she would. He wishes he could gauge what she’s feeling after having gone through the past five days, since her daughter went missing. “People keep coming by,” she says. “I feel like I’m saying the same thing over and over. I feel like I’m saying it for them more than me, that it’s okay, that no news isn’t bad news. And all I keep thinking is, ‘
Thank you, thank you, really, but I don’t want another fucking casserole.’
I want to say, ‘I’m sorry, but please understand, I’m not even hungry’ ”

“Do you want some coffee?”

“I’m not thirsty, either,” she says. “Not for that.”

“Okay,” he says, sitting down beside her. He is grateful she at least seems calm.

“I was up all night. I can smell her on her bed, so I try and sleep there, but then I can’t sleep so I get up again.” Her voice trails off.

Frank sets down his coffee. He doesn’t get the morning paper at the end of the sidewalk, though he thinks a simple action would be the easiest thing to do and might break whatever tension exists in the moment. He can smell the leftover booze on her, knows more about Ginny than he should, perhaps, first from Natalia and then from their own conversations that continued after Natalia left: Ginny’s love of gin; the disability she collected after her husband, Ron, shot himself; the problems she had with her daughter, ones that almost everyone knew about despite her desire for privacy. He remembers Natalia once saying,
For God’s sake, if she’s going to yell at her daughter, at least she should shut the windows.
After six months of conversation and Ginny’s tentative trust in Frank, she still does not come inside the house to sit, as she might have with Natalia. It is as if the house is somehow off-limits for Ginny, as if being alone with Frank, in the domain of more private exchanges, would somehow betray her friendship with Natalia. Maybe, Frank sometimes thinks, it is a sign of respect to Natalia, who was, at forty-two, Ginny’s senior by eight years. Or maybe it is something else. Maybe she doesn’t trust him. She never really asks anything of him, not even to clip her hedges, though he often does anyway and believes it’s a start.

“It was strange in the house,” she says. “I never realized that before—how empty the house could be. Vicki was such a chatterbox. Half the time I just wanted her to shut the hell up, you know. I hate to say that, but it’s what I thought. I can’t just say that to most people, though. I regret even thinking it. I know it’s wrong to have thought it at all. She was just doing what kids do; she was just telling me about her day, about the silly things in her day, half of it she just dreamed up.”

Frank takes a sip of coffee. “Sissy gets yappy too.”

“Girls,” she says.

“I know.” He waits, thinking. Finally, he says, “Any news?”

“No news is good news,” she says. “That’s what they tell me, anyway.
The police put up flyers on store windows, around the neighborhood, too. They questioned some guy over on Ellwine. He has a record, minor stuff. But the guy was in Jersey that night, visiting his sister or something. They said they confirmed his whereabouts. They talked to people in the neighborhood, too, but you’ve already heard that.”

“I know,” he said. “Eva and Sissy were talking about it.”

“They talked to people who live by the park, asked if they saw anything.”

“Did they?”

She shakes her head and removes a fresh cigarette from her pack of Slims and holds it out to him.

“No, thanks. I’m trying to quit.”

“Yeah, me too.” She holds it to her mouth and lights it. Her hands shake. “No one ever sees anything. You’d have to be fucking God to see everything, wouldn’t you? That’s what I tell myself.”

Frank picks up the pack of cigarettes and taps one out. He takes her lighter, flicks it. He inhales, remembering all too quickly how good a cigarette can be, how it gives him something to do with his hands when he’s restless.

“The police,” she says, her voice shakier now. “I went to the park, too. I drove around town, looking. It seemed better than being in the house. It seemed better than just waiting, but then I started to think,
My God, what if I found her? What if I found her and she wasn’t—
‘ ”

“I can help, if you want. We can go together, today, and look.”

She looks over to him, her eyes welling up. “It’s like if I don’t think about it, she might be upstairs, reading or writing in her diary, you know, writing about boys and school and friends, or maybe writing about me, writing about how awful I am.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Frank says. He keeps his voice as steady as possible. He wants to take her shaking hands in his and press them tight. Still, he also knows there is hardly anything he might say, hardly anything he might do to take away a mother’s grief, the sudden loss of a child. He remembers Natalia, how she carried a son, their firstborn,
through the early months of their marriage. The baby died three days after birth. Natalia went into shock in the operating room from losing too much blood. She almost died with the baby. After that, a depression eclipsed her for months, and Frank, seeing this all, felt rubbed raw. She blamed herself, her body’s unwillingness to support life, to root something. “I wasn’t ready,” she told him. “And look—bad luck.” They didn’t talk about their son; even the girls didn’t know. After Eva was born, Natalia would sneak into the nursery at night and check to make sure everything was all right. Her vigilance lasted for years, until Eva’s first day of school. He remembers how Natalia followed Eva’s bus, how she watched Eva, small for her age, her long hair pinned back, how Eva lumbered down the steps with a yellow book bag slung over her shoulder. Natalia recounted all this to Frank, though of course Eva herself would never know that Natalia watched her at all. It is the mothers who are left to the more complicated, tenuous things; it is the mothers who find themselves waiting on their children, imagining them rushing in through the door.