Precious (18 page)

Outside, in the glare, Sissy stands atop the ladder, holding the limp garden hose, pretending to spray water into the pool. She dances back from it, to avoid getting wet. She drops the hose. She leans over, pretending to measure. She climbs to the lip of the pool and walks. Natalia raps on the window. Sissy looks up, toward the kitchen, and inexplicably smiles. Natalia motions that it’s time to come inside. When Sissy doesn’t, Natalia opens the door and yells before Sissy jumps down, landing
with a heavy thud on the grass. She holds her arms up as if performing. “We’ve got to go out,” Natalia says.

“Out, in!” Sissy yells. “Make up your mind!” She runs by her, her body smelling of sun. She comes back downstairs a few minutes later, dressed and ready. She eyes Natalia, who is holding Sissy’s drawings in her hand.

“I made them for you,” Sissy says, suddenly shy again.

“I think we should give them to Ginny instead. What do you think?”

“I made them for you. They’re
originals,”
Sissy explains, her voice rising.

“All the more reason,” Natalia says, “to share them with Ginny. After we go grocery shopping, we’ll stop by her house and see how she’s doing. You don’t think a drawing will make Ginny feel better?”

Sissy stares fiercely. Another hole burned into Natalia’s body. Sissy grabs the pictures from her mother’s hand.

“Do you think she’s dead?” Sissy asks, struggling to keep next to her mother as, later, they jaunt down the tree-lined street to Ginny’s house. The heat hits Natalia, flattening her like a bulldozer and melting the chocolate chip cookies she bought from the grocery store. A pleasant day, yes, were it not for the humidity that she didn’t notice when she got out of the cab earlier, the mugginess over everything that reminds her of so many summer days. She looks up at the sky, the big clouds over her, bright, heartbreakingly still.
Is there never a good medium?
she wonders.
Is there always a drought or flood? All or nothing?
And how awful to be caught between extremes, with not enough choices, with not enough reconciliation between disparities. Natalia holds her free hand up against her neck, wiping the sweat from it.

“I told you not to listen to Eva,” she says.

“Eva’s never lied to me.”

Natalia glares at her daughter, catches herself. She’s positively unnerved by Sissy’s new affection toward her sister, her irritating defiance. Before Natalia left, Eva spent most of her time ignoring Sissy, refusing to let her come into her bedroom, screaming when she’d find that Sissy had gotten into her lipsticks again. “Your sister used to lie to you all the time. She told you you were adopted. She told you that we brought you home from a church. Now she’s some moral authority and compass?”

Sissy dismisses this altogether, tucks any cruelties away in the past. “Well, do you think Vicki’s dead then?”

“Don’t you dare say that, Sissy Kisch. Particularly in front of Ginny” She stops, turns, and grabs Sissy’s arm suddenly. “I mean that. Don’t be sassy.”

“I’m not sassy, but you did
leave,
after all. I don’t know anyone who’s died, but I bet a madman did it. I bet that’s what happened to Vicki. Or, my favorite
theory
is this: She ran away. I can guess why, if you care. She didn’t like her mother. She thought her mother was a real bitch.”

In this Natalia hears an accusation leveled against her. She eyes Sissy, tells her to watch her language. “I hope you didn’t say that when Ginny visited our house, did you?”

“No.” Sissy stares for a moment before pulling her arm away. “She hardly ever talks to me.”

Natalia falls silent. She opens the gate and climbs up the porch steps. Before she rings the bell, she says, sternly, “Remember what I said. Not a word. Talk less, Sissy, not more.”

When Ginny opens the door, Natalia simultaneously extends the plate of cookies, announces that she’s returned, and goes to put her arm around Ginny in an awkward, loose embrace. She steps away then, brushes back her hair, and raises her chin without meaning to, aware once again of a distance. There was a time when she wanted Ginny’s friendship more than anything. She needed a confidante and yearned for conversations. There was a time when the women were like thieves, spending Saturday afternoons together, awkwardly hatching plans
against the neighbors, sipping martinis. Shouldn’t she have expected that a woman like Ginny would sense, in Natalia’s departure, an opportunity? That she would be grateful for a man who, despite any flaws, always provided, without complaint? Natalia might have imagined Frank with another woman in that time she was away. But when she did, the faces were inconsequential: a girl picked up over a drink; someone he met casually; someone who, in the days and weeks afterward, he would have difficulty remembering at all. But that Frank might have taken up with a woman Natalia believed to be a friend—and she must reconsider this now—is something she had not expected at all. Frank and Ginny were never particularly close before Natalia left, though it was true they were cordial and it was true Frank could always make Ginny laugh with a light joke now and then. Still, it was Natalia who took Ginny in when she first moved to the neighborhood. She was the one who defended Ginny against the rumors and admonishments leveled by the other women: Ginny’s husband’s suicide, the drinking that ensued, Ginny’s failure to hold a job, her subsequent applications for disability. Then there were the screams the women sometimes heard, the fights with Vicki that created more animosity and disdain, particularly from those women who prided themselves on being good mothers.

She waits, watching Ginny, wondering. Only a moment passes, but it feels like an eternity.

“Thank you,” Ginny says, taking the plate, not bothering to look to see what it is. She sets it down on the living room table, atop a pile of newspapers and flyers. When Natalia is left to linger, she ushers Sissy forward and shuts the door behind them. She surveys the disarray: a vase on the table filled with wilted flowers; the ashtray next to it that overflows with cigarette ends. Ginny’s photograph of Vicki—long-sleeved red shirt, a gold locket around her neck, a dimpled smile, the backdrop blue like a clear sky—stares out from the table, eerily. There are countless photos of Vicki around the room, on tables and chairs. Natalia picks one up and holds it, remembering the girl who tormented Sissy, the girl who was unruly and always in trouble, the girl who, as if taking after her
mother, was prone to a recklessness and disorder that matches this very room. “Sissy told me,” Natalia says, not knowing what else to say. She realizes her hands are trembling. She believes if she tries to make pleasantries, she’ll only seem unkind; but if she says nothing, the moment will continue this way: awkwardly, with an unsettling quiet.

Ginny gives her a look—sullen, suppressed. Natalia understands this loss. Every complicated feeling held in check and buried deep would erupt if Vicki were suddenly found, sending Ginny into hysterics, like the old women whose children were taken from them, while they stretched out their arms and screamed. “You should try and get dressed,” Natalia begins. “It’ll make you feel better.”

Ginny looks down at her housecoat. “I haven’t felt like going out.” She sits down, places her hands between her tight knees.

With her pictures in hand, Sissy moves over to the high-back chair in the corner of the room. She regards the drawings. Natalia can’t fathom why her daughter would put up such a fuss over a few simple sketches, or why she seems wholly incapable of sharing. She is grateful that Sissy is at least being quiet.

“It’s my fault,” Ginny says, not bothering to look at Natalia directly. “I should have watched.”

Natalia tries to ignore the lamp shade that’s askew, the faint layer of dust over everything, the trash, the lip of a bottle tucked in the couch cushion. She sits alongside Ginny. “Lots of things can happen whether you watch or not,” she says, not unkindly. “Things can happen outside a house or in them. You can’t hide children away. You can’t stick them in front of the TV all day and deny them play and fresh air. What would happen if we did that?”

Ginny looks over at her then. Her tone is almost cruel. “And look what happened when I didn’t do that, when I didn’t make her watch TV and stay inside.”

“It was bad luck,” Natalia says, surprised by the resentment she hears. “A one-in-a-million chance.”

Ginny says nothing, and Natalia rights herself. How many times did she spend with Ginny mulling over recipes or discussing the girls’ elaborate pool rituals, their habit of make-believe and conspiracies? Were their children the reason a friendship was formed at all? In the absence of the girls, did they really need anything from each other? She doesn’t know. “Sissy has a gift for you, too,” Natalia explains.

She waits as Sissy stands and pulls her T-shirt down. In the end, back at the house, Natalia had to bribe Sissy to procure the pictures. Now Sissy hands the drawings to Ginny. “I made them,” she says. “They’re originals.” Natalia catches the evil eye. Her daughter looks out the window, at the same thing she stared at when they waited at the door: the bike parked up on the porch, leaning against the railing. How pale Sissy became, seeing it, how contemplative she suddenly grew.

Ginny runs her hand over the drawings. “That’s very nice of you. You were her best friend.” She catches herself. “Are her best friend.”

“Yes,” Sissy says, nodding, unsure.

“I’ll clean up for you.” Natalia does not wait for a response. She immediately sets about gathering up the flyers and stacking them neatly on the table. She concentrates on the task at hand, pushes away any thoughts that disturb her. “Has Frank been over to help with the yard?” This is said perhaps too lightly.

“We’ve always been friends, haven’t we?” Ginny looks up at Natalia, and Natalia cannot tell whether she is speaking of them or of Frank.

“You must be tired,” Natalia says. She runs her fingers over the burn mark on the couch, the circular black shape made from an unattended cigarette. She does this so that Ginny sees her do it. She straightens the pillows.

“You don’t have to clean,” Ginny says. “I’m fine.”

“Nonsense. If I don’t, who will? You’ve got enough going on.”

“Vicki always thought of you as her best friend, Sissy,” Ginny says. She pushes the plate of cookies forward. “Do you want one of these?”

“Okay,” Sissy says.

“No, that’s for later. That’s for Ginny. You’re getting ice cream, remember?” To Ginny, Natalia says, “We don’t need anything. We came to help out. Sissy told me Frank comes over, too, to help.”

“Frank ‘s been a help, yes.”

“Of course. Did you—”

“What?”

Natalia shakes her head. “Nothing.” She brushes the ash from the table, into the tray.

“He said Vicki would come home,” Ginny tells her. “Frank.”

Something shifts in Natalia, though she doesn’t want it to. A tension mounts in her shoulders, a wildness pushes in her heart. Her look grows cold, serene. “Do you believe that?”

“I have to.”

“A ten-year-old? On her own?”

“Mom,” Sissy says. “Don’t.”

“She’s very smart; she’d find her way home,” Ginny says. “You did.”

“Really?”

“Mom,” Sissy says.

“Anything is possible,” Natalia tells her, “but what is likely is an altogether different story.”

“Less talk, Mom.”

The moment Sissy says this, Natalia regrets her words. “You’re right,” she says, composing herself. She smooths her shirt. “I’m sorry. I’m tired and not thinking practically. Of course Frank’s right. Of course Vicki is going to come back.” Breathless, nearing tears, she retreats to the kitchen and surveys the broken glass on the floor, a partial footprint, a shocking smear of blood on the dingy tiles. She can only imagine what Ginny must be like after emptying a bottle, staggering around, her home unfamiliar. On the table a fruit basket has been left to rot—the grapes have withered on their vine, the apples have grown blemishes, and the oranges sicken the air. A note from Milly reads, simply, “Everyone is hoping for the best and keeping an eye out.” How jarring, Natalia thinks, to live off scraps, on the things other people throw
to you. How jarring to think people watch because you don’t. There is always such a fine line between a statement meant to soothe and a taunt.

She finds the dustpan, cleans up the glass. She wets a rag and wipes the floor.

“You’re her best friend,” Ginny says, forcing a smile.

The words come to Sissy again, from out of the ether. “Best friend”—the implication of the phrase a light burden.

“She was so nervous her first day in school, being in a new place, and you were kind to her, to sit with her at lunch. Remember all your sleepovers?”

Sissy nods, remembering most everything: the first day of class and Vicki’s stories about her father’s Purple Heart; the many instances when she picked Sissy for volleyball or dodgeball before those who excelled in such arenas; the long searches for ghosts and conversations under the covers; the posed questions:
Did you ever kiss a boy?
How Sissy would blush, thinking not of a boy but
Greg,
Eva’s friend with the dreamy gaze.
I haven’t kissed any boy yet,
Sissy explained.
Me neither,
Vicki said.
But it’s a goal for next year.

Sissy isn’t even sure she likes the girl who was once a friend and was then hated, and who is now, in absence, elevated to the stature of beloved, cherished. Mrs. Anderson’s words allow Sissy a reason to
mourn,
in much the same way she sees on television: dramatically, with tears she only half possesses. An odd thing. Even if it is all true, that they were best friends and that because of that fact alone they are still such, she can’t say she likes Mrs. Anderson, the same woman who, after the incident with Precious, came over to pick Vicki up a full day in advance of her scheduled departure—the sleepover cut hastily short. And when she saw the damage done to Vicki’s hair—while ignoring the damage done to Sissy’s doll—she yelled, causing Sissy to cry from embarrassment, from the shock of another mother acting like her own. That this
was also done publicly, in front of Natalia, who did nothing to come to Sissy’s defense, and that Vicki could witness Sissy’s humiliation, made the entire event unforgivable. Only Eva seemed to sense in Sissy the extent of the damage. “She deserved it, that little shit,” she told Sissy when, for the first time ever, Sissy begged entry into Eva’s room and not their mother’s.