The Border of Paradise: A Novel (31 page)

In the early morning, on the front porch, barefoot with scissors in hand, I can barely see anything. Birds are calling—trills, appoggiaturas—and I sense a flock shifting in the sycamore five yards from my face. (Immediately before Wellbrook my father’s visions all involved birds, particularly crows and ravens. At dinner he’d duck, hands slamming on the table so hard the plates rattled.) Sarah is restless, pacing in the dark and perhaps hungry. I gather my hair in a makeshift ponytail and lop it off. I snip off the remaining hair. The sibilant cutting is louder than I thought it would be, and when I finish I pat my head all over with my free hand. It’s very short. The sky is now a purplish blue and I can make out the snickering outlines of trees and bushes, the J-shaped curls of my locks on the porch, and then I sit among the potted cacti to watch the sun rise.

The door opens. Sarah barks once. William says good morning, a little nervously, and adds, “Your hair. My God.”

“Do I look like a boy?”

“Sort of. Not really. That’s quite a mess you made there.”

“That’s why I did it outside. How did you know I was out here?”

“I heard you leave.”

Am I less pretty now?
is what I want to ask, but instead I say, “I needed a change.”

William says, “Did you sleep all right?”

“I didn’t have any dreams.”

“The best kind of sleep. I had awful dreams. I’ve never been so happy to wake up.”

He pauses, as if waiting to see if I’ll ask him about his dreams, and I know that he’s not going to leave me alone.

“I’d better sweep this hair off the porch.”

He says, “You’re breaking my heart, kid.”

I go to the side of the house where the broom is, a splayed mess of bristles and dust, and come back to whisk the remnants of my long hair off the porch.

“I mean, gosh,” he says, “it just breaks my heart. Let’s go inside. I’ll practice, and you can make some breakfast, all right?” He puts his cold hand on the back of my freshly naked neck, and I lean the broom against the wall.

“I need to feed Sarah,” I say as we go inside. He sits at the table and I go to look for something to give her. There is half a hunk of ground beef. I calculate an amount that could be taken without incident or perhaps even notice and put it on a plate, plus a fish head. As I turn to go outside William says, “Ma,” and Ma is standing in the doorway of the kitchen, watching me. Her face is as blank as a flat palm held out, and though I feel a ticklish warning in my solar plexus, I am with the plate and I open the door. Sarah sees the food and is eager, tail swaying. Something moves behind me; my arm jerks as Ma reaches for the plate and pulls it out of my hand, out a long throw so that the plate whirls far with the sound of food hitting the dirt. I don’t make a sound. She tells me to come inside, and I do.

Ma in her robe and perfectly curled hair stares at me over breakfast. Her gaze makes me feel like I’m coming out of my body, rising a few inches above my corporeal form. I can feel the slip of skin against flesh, bones wet in air. When I pour myself a cup of coffee I catch a curved sight of myself in the pot, which surprises me. The absence of hair makes my features more
prominent. I look like I have an enormous and pointed nose. The glasses are another feature. The dimple in the center of my chin is reminiscent of a potter’s careful thumbprint on the bottom of our ceramic mugs. She says nothing about the food, the plate I will have to retrieve and bring inside to wash. I take my coffee with a little bit of cream and no sugar, and the entire time I sip from the mug I think of the girl in the coffeepot, looking out.

It is possible that Ma thinks I’ll be headed to Wellbrook next. I’ve had long hair my entire life. And I cannot recall another epoch of such anger from her except when my father died. If I could only feel the tenderness that suffused me in the bathtub last night. But it was hard to find, hard to wrap my arms around, harder still to recapture. All the furniture looks smaller today.

“I don’t want Sarah to stay tied up out there,” I say, and though William’s eyes are widening, I continue: “Her legs have got the itch. She needs to go on a walk.”

Ma shakes her head.

I say, “With William. We’ll go together. He can keep an eye on me, make sure we come home in time and don’t go anywhere we shouldn’t.”

“That dog just eats our food,” Ma says.

“I never give her the good food,” I say, which is not entirely true.

“It didn’t even keep the bad man away. Barks to the heavens.”

“Ma, I’ll take her,” William says. “She wants to go.”

Ma’s face pinches up as she considers, perhaps thinking of the togetherness of such an activity, and then she says, “Stay in the field. I’ll find you a whistle. But you can always stay in here. There’s plenty to do inside. You can unstring the beans. You can memorize a poem or ten lines of Chinese verse.”

“We’ll stay in the field,” says William.

“Or wash the dishes. Why don’t you wash the dishes first,” Ma says, rising, clanking them into the sink. “If you don’t wash the dishes the egg yolk is going to stick to the pan and to the plates and to the spoons and everything, and it’s never going to come off.”

What she’s said about the egg thing is true, so William goes to the sink and starts to rinse the dishes. His arms move vigorously as he scrubs the plates with his bare hands. I get up and start moving things around on the table, like the salt and pepper shakers, just so I can have something to do. Someone has loosened the top of the saltshaker, probably to be funny. Probably it was
William. Maybe it was me, but I can’t remember. I screw the silver top of the saltshaker back on and feel validated; I’m a useful member of the family, no matter what anyone thinks.

I go over to William and whisper, “Thanks.”

He shrugs a shoulder. Then he turns his head to kiss me, his hands poised in the sink, the running water shushing us as it slides over everything.

When we put on our shoes to leave, Ma hears us from the back porch and stands in the doorway. She hands William a whistle on a string, which he wears around his neck. She hands him a knife, which he puts in his pocket, and it hangs heavily there.

“Don’t go too far,” she says.

“All right, Ma,” William says. “We’ll be as safe as two buns in a basket.”

“If you see anyone, don’t talk to them. If it starts to rain, head straight home. If you lose the dog in the woods, don’t follow it. Never leave your sister alone.”

We say okay and head into the field, holding hands. Sarah trots ahead of us on her rope. She stops to smell patches of interminable grass, and who knows what she’s sensing, who knows what invisible messages she’s gathering from the land. She turns her head occasionally to look at me:
Are you still there?
I look into her eyes,
Yes.

“You know,” William says, “I did this so that you could leave the house.” He is proud of himself, but not cocky. He stops walking and hugs me. The sky hangs low overhead. “I love you. I love you so, so much. Did you know? I love you so, so, so much.”

“Oh,” I say. “I love you, too.” I hug him back. The hug is a hug that lasts forever. I can feel his love trembling beneath his skin, like he’s plugged into an outlet and love is running like electricity through all of his nerves through the ends of his fingers, and when he touches me I can feel the shock, like we’re going to explode. Why is it so easy for him and not for me? Maybe I’m not wired right. Maybe the bleeding isn’t enough and I’m not mature yet. Maybe I’m unripe.

When we disengage from each other, I crouch in the meadow, softly calling Sarah to me; Sarah turns her long head and her mouth opens into a grin as she comes to nose my armpits, to lick my face until I laugh.

William says, “You really love this dog, huh.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you mind if I ask why? I don’t mean to pry into the inner recesses of your heart, but you seem to love this dog all out of proportion. As if we’ve had her in our lives since David was around. You barely know her, and yet you spend hours with her.”

“I suppose because she’s mine.”

“She’s no one’s, really. She was someone else’s. Then she ran away. She seems to be a rather itinerant pup. Ma was kind enough to let you keep her in the first place. It was probably against the rules to begin with.”

“Fuck the rules,” I say.

“Gillian.”

“I mean it!” I pull myself up. “The
rules
are of no benefit to me.”

We walk farther into the long meadow, and all around us there is nothing except for a tree here and a tree there, twisting trees that have lived longer than either of us and will outlast us, too. I watch my dog’s shoulders pump up and down, alternating, and after a spell of whirling thoughts—the rules, Ma’s rules, the rules for me and about me—I have a wild hair about going into the woods or to the river. Why? This is the sort of thing that Ma fears: the lure of the hook and reel. I can’t tell William; he’ll go to Ma. William loves me but his loyalty is not to me. His heart belongs to me but his blood and bones belong to our mother.

“We should head back,” he says.

“No,” I say. “I want to keep going.” I’m close to tears but I bite them back. I hate crying in front of William; I know it makes him sad, and I hate to look weak. I’m overcome with a sadness violent as downpour, am soaking with it. I touch the back of my neck, and for a moment I’m surprised by the lack of hair. Then I remember.

“Oh, honey,” William says. “You look miserable.”

I turn away. “Leave me alone—”

“I can’t, honey, I can’t. I’m supposed to be with you. I told Ma I would.”

“Just for a second,” I say, “I’m not going anywhere,” and then a sob slips through my lips so that I’m choking on it; a sob is an act of violence that the body self-inflicts. I can’t go anywhere. I stand and feel my body grieving without my permission to do so.

William, thank God, watches me cry without trying to put his arms around me or kiss my neck or any such thing. Sarah, who had momentarily wandered away on her rope, comes back to me in silence.

This time I don’t argue when William says that it’s probably time to go back. We walk back through the long meadow. I see the house, and William slips his hand in mine. “Wait. Look at me,” he says. I look at him. He wipes my eyes before we go inside, wipes the tears off my face, removes the evidence, says, “Honey, chickadee, it’s okay.”

These are the new rules: I’m not allowed to leave the house without Ma, William, or, preferably, both. I am not allowed to go into town. Therefore, William is not allowed to go into town, because I am not allowed to stay at home alone. Now we are having family meetings every day. In these family meetings, we talk about things that are unifying us and things that are dividing us. We are striving for things that unify us (naturally). Things that divide us must be eliminated. At this family meeting is where the rules are defined. We sit at the kitchen table. William has arranged his face in a semblance of nonchalance, picking at the table with his thumbnail. There exists an interminably mythical story about my father buying this table and having to enlarge the doors to get it in. It’s one of my favorite stories about him because it seems so outlandish, and makes my father seem grand in a manner that has nothing to do with madness. One of Ma’s ideas is to string bells along the top of the front and back doors, and the windows, too. She disapproves of Sarah—“the dog”—and wants me to reconsider caring for her, to which I respond by casting my eyes to my hands and refusing to look up. The night of the day that the bells are strung I wake up after some hours and it’s like I never went to sleep. William has one arm flung over me, and it rises up and down like a boat on the sea.

Running away is the thought that’s been whispering in my head since Ma pinned me to the bed, and it will not go away.

In my dream the river is crowded with naked ivory bodies. They glide through the water and swim froglike, with their arms and legs sweeping outward and then retreating back to the sources of themselves—the bodies swim on and on, and they never stop or decrease in number. All of them are the same, androgynous,
having not-quite-wide hips and no signs of budding or budded breasts, being not broad-shouldered and neatly bald. Odder still, I realize, is the fact that they never come up for air, but keep swimming; the river is teeming with them like ants on sugar. I call to them, as though we could communicate—
Where are you going?
—but none of them reply; still they do not come up for air, still they move with fluent urgency. And slowly the water darkens, as though a shadow has come overhead—the sky is cloudless and merrily blue—now wine-red water, darker still, now terrible blood. The stench is appalling and I clap my hand over my face, but the reek of filthy blood is not as appalling as the white bodies, which now thrash and buck and cause me to realize now that they have no faces, the fronts of their heads are as smooth as the scar on my lower back: a childhood incident. The bodies are trying to get out of the blood but cannot, and yet more bodies arrive until the inhuman bodies are crammed together, arms flailing, legs kicking, a Gordian knot of limbs, and I watch them die, their perfect white bodies now saturated in the
coeur
-color of my heart, suffocating, drowning, and yet I feel nothing.