Chapter 10
— Chapter 10 —
The downstairs bathtub is scummy, and the drain is partly clogged, so water puddles, then makes a tornado as it trickles down. I wet my hair. The temperature fades from cold to warm, which means the water heater still works.
I mix the bleach and use plastic mittens to rub the stinky goop through my hair the best I can. It makes my scalp burn, but I like having something immediate to reckon with when everything feels too vast and bright.
Step’s yellow safety razor is in a soap-stained tumbler on the bathroom counter. There are specks of beard dust stuck to the glass like sand, and I can smell his canned shaving cream, even though I know the bathroom actually smells like long-standing toilet water and grout mold.
As a kid when I got bored, I’d go in the bathroom to shake his shaving cream can, spray a little in the sink, then run the water to watch the foam dissolve. One time, I lost myself and filled the whole sink. I tapped my flat hand against the foam and felt the resistance, sunk my fingers in to see them disappear. It took a long time to wash all that shaving cream down the drain, and I carried a sick feeling in my stomach for days, waiting to be yelled at for being wasteful. But Step never mentioned the empty can. I don’t know if he suspected me, or if he was so unaware of the status of his shaving cream it didn’t occur to him that he’d come to the end early. I wish I could ask him if all the elements of his life felt haphazard and shocking, if that is also part of my inheritance.
In the toothpaste-splattered mirror, with my hair matted in bleach, my face looks way too much like his. His eyes were muddy hazel and mine are very dark brown, but they’re deep set the same way, under the same short forehead and sharp brow. I don’t make a habit of looking at myself more than I have to. In certain light, from certain angles, I can see my mother and sister, both sets of grandparents, a few cousins, my great-aunt. They appear unexpectedly the way a dolphin or a heart or a moon would emerge from those ugly 3D posters that were all the rage when I was in high school. Bleaching my hair will probably make me look more like Step, and I’m wishing I’d gone with burgundy instead. I remember Momo showing me black and white pictures of baby Step, wide-eyed and melancholy, with a halo of white-blond curls like The Little Prince. As he grew up, his hair darkened, but he was still wispy, thin-skinned, sad. Even at fifty, he had the appearance of a bewildered child. I feel similarly wispy and taken aback by how everything is louder and hurts harder and smells worse and requires more effort than anyone lets on. I don’t know if existing works like that for everyone else—if other people feel less or ignore more—but I think it’s possible that Step experienced the visceral like I do and I’m only slightly better at shutting down than he was. Sometimes, when I try hard enough, I can go completely numb. I think maybe he felt most of it.
My mother used to say that Step diluted her genes, so everything about me—my hair, my skin, my intelligence—was lighter than it should have been. She had to put sunscreen on me way more than Steena. She had to deal with my fine, frizzy curls that always looked messy and made people think she didn’t even try (when lord knows she worked so hard to make me presentable that it ate up all her time and was a serious contribution to the total ruining of her life).
Steena and my mother had hair that was the color of crows and could stay in a ponytail without flyaways. They tanned nicely in the sun and didn’t have allergies or get the hiccups from chewing gum. They could drive fast on highways and make good time and parallel park on the first try. On road trips, they played a game where they’d add up all the numbers from the license plates they saw. I could never keep up, and Steena would laugh at me mercilessly when she caught me counting on my fingers. They didn’t bite their nails or get confused by homonyms or telling time on an analog watch.
Everything that was hard for me came with the same refrain: You’re just like your father . Everyone, including me, believed I must have gotten my struggle from Step’s side of the family. And it was always presented as if I’d willed myself into existence in this exact form, therefore I was the one who should be ashamed of the result.
One time during Sunday dinner at Nonna and Babbo’s house, when Great-Uncle Dom got drunk earlier than usual, he started ranting about how his nephew was marrying an Irish girl.
“She’s a perfectly nice girl,” Nonna said in her hushing voice, cheeks flushed, and I knew her water glass was filled with vodka. She wouldn’t dare contradict him otherwise. “There’s nothing wrong with being Irish.”
“Jesus-Mary-Mother! I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being Irish , Aida!” Dom shouted, spitting bits of food across the table. “All I’m saying is that the Irish should marry the Irish, and Italians should marry Italians! We have to stop mixing is what I’m saying! We’re ruining ourselves.”
I watched Step’s face go red. My mother stared at me with dagger eyes. I’d spilled red sauce down the front of my Sunday dress, and I could feel her zeroing in on the stain. I felt certain she was thinking that if she’d had another good Italian kid, she’d be looking at a pretty little girl with smooth hair, tanned skin, and a clean dress, instead of the sunburned, frizzy, gravy -spilling disaster she’d been stuck with. That night, when she put me to bed and I said “Goodnight, I love you,” she didn’t say it back.
The next weekend, Step said he wasn’t going to Sunday dinner, and I pretended to be sick until after my mother and Steena left. When the coast cleared and I went outside to play, Step was cleaning the gutters, and enlisted me to hold a garbage bag to catch the smelly leaf gunk he threw down from the top of the ladder. He mumbled to himself as he scraped at the buildup with a putty knife. I couldn’t make out his words, but their cadence was sharp and hissing. When he climbed down with the last clump of rotten leaves in his fist, he looked at me and said, “Never marry an Italian.”
And even though I wasn’t Italian enough for my mother’s family, I felt certain Step was saying no one should marry me either.
I can’t tell if I’ve left the bleach in long enough or too long—I forgot to time it—but it seems like I’ve been in this bathroom for days. The showerhead is clogged with calcium deposits and sprays at awkward angles as I rinse. When I reach up to reattach it to the holder, my foot slips on wet tile and I fall, ribs slamming into the side of the tub.
I cannot breathe.
I don’t have the strength to push myself up, and the weight of my body against the cold porcelain is too much for my lungs. My heart is a tadpole in a shrinking puddle, and I feel so sorry that Aubrey will find me like this. I sob and then gasp, and then suddenly, I am breathing again. The air smells like Step’s shaving cream and mold and bleach. I need air that smells like trees and moss and nothing. I walk my hands up the side of the tub, pull myself to sitting, then lean on the sink to stand all the way. I grab the door frame, palm the walls in the hallway. End table. Arm of the couch, other arm and then and then. I stand on my own long enough to twist the doorknob and let myself outside. My hair is wet. Jam’s undershirt is soaked. In a moment the cold will become a problem, but right now it is everything I need. I lean against the door frame and breathe until I feel high on oxygen.
The wrought iron railing is crumbling into rust. There’s a cracked terra-cotta strawberry planter with moldy plant carcasses poking out from each opening. It’s hard to look anywhere without getting overwhelmed.
I notice a pom-pom on the doormat, red and fluffy against the mossy black rubber, and it feels like a bright little moment of joy. It reminds me of those creatures with felt feet and googly eyes that I bought at the school store in fourth grade. I crouch to pick it up, ignoring the ache in my side. Just as my fingers touch the fuzz, I see the beak. Not fuzz, feathers. Dull eyes like scuffed black beads receding into a cardinal’s skull.
I step back, trip on the door jamb, and fall on my ass into the house, the cut edges of my skin shifting. I may have split in two. I try to focus on my breath escaping in clouds, but the world looks blurry. And then I see, in a circle around the base of the planter, more bird heads, arranged by type. Finches mostly. A chickadee. The angry crown of a blue jay, tattered. I’m too spent to pull myself far enough inside to close the door, and I’m worried I might throw up—better outside than in. I lean against the door frame, hoping the nausea will pass, breathing, deep and slow, until all that’s left is the pulse of the pain.
Around the time the shivering starts, Aubrey walks up the driveway, school bag over her shoulder, black boots clomping against the crumbling asphalt, and I feel like I’m watching from the outside. She could be part of the pulse.
As she walks up the steps, her boot makes a scraping sound against the flagstone like she has gravel stuck in the treads. She shouts, “You’re letting all the heat out!”
I try to get up and can’t. “You’re not supposed to be here,” I say.
“What did you do to your hair?” She’s standing over me now. “It’s orange.”
“Steena will kill me.”
“Is that blood?” Aubrey points to my stomach.
“No,” I say, grabbing at my shirt.
“It is.”
“No,” I say again. Not a denial. A plea.
“Shit.” Aubrey drops her backpack and sits next to me, pulling my arm around her shoulder. “Alright. One. Two. Three.” She hauls me to my feet.
I assume we’re going in the house, but Aubrey says, “Nope,” and reaches to close the door.
We take the stairs down to the driveway one at a time. Aubrey pulls the key to Step’s awful station wagon from her pocket as we inch toward his car.
“Take mine,” I say.
“Do you have the keys?”
I shake my head. They could be on the counter in the bathroom, but I can’t remember.
“We’re taking this car,” Aubrey says.
Step used to eat a banana in the morning on his way to work. He’d forget the peel, leaving it to bake on the dashboard all day, making the air inside thick and sickly sweet. When Aubrey helps me in, I’m sure I can smell it.
“Bananas,” I say.
“It is bananas,” she says. “Why are your guts bleeding?”
The words are stuck in my brain, so I lift my shirt to show her the bandage, watching her reaction because I’m too scared to look myself.
She wasn’t expecting to see Frankenstein’s monster mess on my belly, so I don’t know if her disgust is meaningful, but she seems like a pretty tough kid. I’m guessing it’s bad.
“Appendix?” she asks. I wouldn’t have known that at her age. She pulls the seat belt across her chest.
“Can you even drive?”
“Not legally,” she says.
“Let me do it.”
“No chance.”
The engine turns on the fifth try. She seems to expect this—both that it won’t start and then exactly when it will. She bites the side of her bottom lip as she backs down the long driveway.
“It’s easier if you roll the window down,” I tell her. “Then follow the outside edge.”
“I’m fine,” she says. And she is. She gets us to the street.
I got caught up in the urgency of the moment, but I can’t afford to go to the hospital. I’m about to tell Aubrey she should take me back to the house when I realize we’re aren’t heading toward the interstate. She turns into Heritage Hills, a community of condos that used to be seniors-only until someone sued someone about age discrimination.
“Where are we going?” I ask as we drive past the golf course, far into the development.
“My friend Shray’s house.” She leans forward to read the numbers on a road sign and murmurs to herself, “It all looks the same here.” She glances at me. “Shray’s grandfather was a surgeon in Pakistan. He helps me sometimes.”
“With what?”
“I had pneumonia in December. He kept track of me.”
“Your mom didn’t take you to the doctor?”
“My mother doesn’t do a lot of things,” she says. There’s so much pain in her face. “Dr. Singh doesn’t mind. He thinks it’s good for retired people to stay busy, and he misses having patients. He was a nurse for a few years after he moved here, but then he opened a dry cleaner. He still takes care of his friends.”
I remember the Singhs and their dry cleaning shop. We took our winter coats there, trading the smell of closet for chemicals. Shray is probably Dr. Singh’s oldest son Ravi’s child. Ravi was in Steena’s class and his twin sisters were a year ahead of me.
In fifth grade, I had to take the afternoon bus to the high school so Steena could keep an eye on me while she had marching band practice. I used to pretend to do homework on the bleachers so I could stare at Ravi’s long legs in his red shorts while he ran wind sprints with the track team. Steena caught me watching him once and called me a pervert. She wasn’t entirely wrong. Ravi was effortlessly cool, and I was caught in that stage of hormones where I swung wildly from wishing I could be Ravi to wanting him to love me. Once when he caught me staring, he winked, and I can still summon that exact moment in my mind—the sparkle in his eyes, the rising feeling in my chest—how special I felt because Ravi Singh saw me staring and was nice to me. Whenever Steena’s friends caught me staring at them, they made faces or gave me the finger or teased Steena about her space cadet sister right in front of me.
I want to ask Aubrey if she knows if Ravi is Shray’s dad, but it feels like the path from my brain to my mouth is rupturing more than usual. Have I lost too much blood? My stomach is cold. I look down, expecting to see an ever-growing patch of red on my shirt, but it’s not much bigger than it was. Maybe even starting to dry.
Dr. Singh is outside knocking dead pine needles from the hedges with a rake. He looks like Ravi, but old. His sweatpants are too baggy to tell anything about his legs, but I bet when he was younger, he was also effortlessly cool. He stops and waves when he sees the station wagon. It’s funny that he’s used to Aubrey driving this car—that he either doesn’t know or care about her lack of license. But Dr. Singh was a surgeon in Pakistan and now he’s a retired dry cleaner, so maybe he realizes following the rules doesn’t always get you to a place that’s fair.
Aubrey rolls down the window. “Dr. Singh!” she calls.
“Shray is at karate,” he says.
“Can you help me?” she asks.
He takes off his work gloves.
She parks in the driveway, and he rushes to her side of the car, pressing the back of his hand to her forehead when she gets out.
“No, I’m okay,” she says, pointing to me.
They both come around to help me out of the car. Pain shoots down my legs and up to my chest. I worry I’ve split in too many pieces, and I don’t understand how Ravi’s dad will be able to put me back together in his condo.
They bring me inside and lay me on the couch. Dr. Singh tries, after the fact, to get a towel under me so I don’t make a stain. I’m terrified that I will bleed all over Ravi’s upholstery.
Dr. Singh holds my wrist to take my pulse. Lifts my shirt to look at the wound. “Oh,” he says, and rests the back of his hand to my forehead. His skin is dry and warm. This is what happened when Ravi was little. When Ravi had the flu, or a cold, or a migraine, when he skinned his knee riding his bike. I want to hug Dr. Singh. I want him to hug me back.
He pulls off the bloody bandage, touches my stomach, pushing slowly but hard. I stifle a yell. He presses above the scar. Under it. At the other side of my stomach. He pulls the lamp from the end table and holds it close to my belly, examining the stitches, then he nods and puts the lamp back.
“I fell,” I say. “I hit my stomach on the side of the bathtub.”
“Why?” he asks, which seems like the wrong question.
I point to my hair, which seems like the wrong answer.
He shakes his head. “How many pills did you take so far today?”
“Five,” I say.
His eyes get wide.
“One was antibiotics,” I tell him, and he nods, happier with that answer.
“Okay,” he says. “Percocet? They were the others?”
“Yes.”
“Tonight, when it’s time for your next pill, take one , not two.” He looks me straight in the eyes, as if he believes his stare can reset the number in my brain. “It hurts because it’s supposed to hurt. Because when it hurts you don’t move too much.”
I nod.
He cleans my wound with gauze and saline from a spray bottle.
“You will be okay,” he says, smiling.
I try not to cry, because those were the words I begged to hear when I scraped my knee as a child. My mother would say that sometimes cuts get infected, and people get sepsis, and it’s never fair to tell anyone that anything will be okay.
“Scars heal inside out,” Dr. Singh says. “Your inside is doing what it should, even if you jostled the outside.”
If my stomach didn’t ache so badly, I would hug him. I can’t spare the money, but I offer to pay anyway, because that’s what’s fair.
Dr. Singh shakes his head. “It’s a favor to Aubrey. Come back in a week and I’ll take out your stitches.”
I wonder what Aubrey has done to inspire this loyalty. Except that I can tell she’s a really special kid. I wouldn’t have known how to help so well when I was her age.
When we drive past the Elephant Hotel, Aubrey kisses her hand and touches the window. “Sorry, Bet,” she whispers, while I think the words in my head. She learned this ritual from me. It’s what I’ve done ever since Mrs. O’Connor told my kindergarten class about Hachaliah Bailey and his famous elephant, as if it were a triumphant tale that made our town special. I used to feel like the only person in all of Somers who understood that a captive elephant is a tragedy.
“Why’d you bleach your hair?” Aubrey asks as she turns down Deans Bridge Road.
I think about giving her a bullshit answer, but it doesn’t seem fair, so I say, “I didn’t want to be here looking like me.”
“I get that,” she says. She seems to be softening, and I wonder if it’s because she was worried about me, or if she’s just on the generous side of a teenage mood swing. I want this to last. I want her to love me. I want to go back in time and do all the things I missed: lost teeth and school plays, the end of training wheels, Halloween costumes, taking her out for a fancy lunch to celebrate her first period, and all the other cool aunt things I started planning in my head from the second I met her. I stare at the chipped black polish on her chewed fingernails and try so hard not to cry. I was going to be there for all of it. I wanted to be.
When I look up, her eyes are teary too. She was like that when she was little. We’re both like that. If we’re not actively trying to block out the feelings of the people around us, they seep in and hurt like our own. Or maybe she’s having her own feelings now. Maybe I’m feeling some of hers.
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
And she says, “I know.”
“I can’t get you up any more stairs,” Aubrey tells me. We’ve made it from the driveway into the house, but the first floor has to be the termination point. I don’t disagree.
Aubrey brings sheets, pillows, and Steena’s old yellow comforter down to the couch in the den. I hate that couch. It’s scratchy and still smells like wool and dust, but the sheets smell clean.
“There are so many heads outside,” I say, after she pulls the comforter over me.
She shoots me a panicked look, but then smiles. “The bird heads.”
“Yeah.”
“They’re from Cory,” she says. “He leaves them.”
I’m about to ask her what kind of fucked up kid is leaving her bird heads, when I realize she’s talking about my cat.
“Coriolanus?”
She nods.
“He’s still alive?” He was the size of my hand when I brought him home. A wild orange goblin who bit everyone. Some lady had a box of sad kittens in front of the grocery store, and I brought Coriolanus home to make my parents mad and have someone who would love me. I wanted to bring him with me when I left, but I knew Step would keep feeding him, and it seemed cruel to take Coriolanus away from his backyard kingdom.
“The cat door was unlocked,” Aubrey says, “so he was fine. He drank water from the pond, I guess. Caught stuff. It was pretty gross—all the mouse bones and bird wings I found in here.”
I feel a sinking shame, like she was cleaning up my mess.
“They called him Cory?”
“No one really got your name for him,” she says.
“Shakespeare.” Jam and I read the complete works one summer. Coriolanus was my favorite. He was killed for making sense.
“I know. I’m not an idiot,” Aubrey says.
“At least they didn’t call him Anus.”
She laughs. Maybe she’s also imagining the absurdity of Step on the back patio calling for a cat named Anus to come in for the night.
Aubrey leaves the room, returning with two glasses of water. “Drink both of these before you fall asleep,” she says. She takes a paper-wrapped sandwich from her bag. Leaves half of it on a napkin on the side table.
“Is the water okay?” I ask. “The well is old. Step had to test it.”
“It’s bottled,” she says. “I keep a few gallons under the sink.”
“Thank you.”
“Can I stay here tonight?” Not quid pro quo. I can tell by her face, she’s earnestly asking. Hoping she doesn’t have to go home to Steena.
“Where will your mom think you are?”
“She thinks I’m still friends with Kelly O’Leary.”
I remember that Kelly was in Aubrey’s nursery school class, and they’d play Polly Pocket together while Kelly’s mom and Steena sat at the marble island in Steena’s kitchen to drink wine and say mean things about other moms. Kelly had strawberry-blond hair, and her index finger was perpetually knuckle-deep in one of her nostrils.
“You’re not friends with Kelly anymore?”
Aubrey snorts. “She’s an asshole. But her mom and my mom hate each other, so my mom won’t call over there to check on me.”
I study Aubrey’s face, the angle of her eyebrows, trying to figure out how secure she feels about this scheme. I want her to be here. I want the chance to learn who she is now. But I’m terrified of luring my sister into my life before I have an exit plan.
“Kelly uses me the same way,” Aubrey says. “So, it’s like mutually assured destruction.”
“You stay here a lot?”
She clears her throat, stares at the ceiling. “Sometimes.” She looks at me. I try to keep my face blank. I think she’s doing the same.
“Okay,” I say, because I am also terrified of spending the night in this house alone when I feel so shitty.
Aubrey blinks a bunch of times, like she’s trying not to cry, but maybe it’s just a stray eyelash.
“Why did you line up the bird heads?” I ask, trying to distract her if it’s tears. I don’t want her to feel awkward on top of whatever else she’s carrying around.
“I don’t know. I kind of like them. After all the animal parts I cleaned up in here, I’m immune.”
“Gross,” I say, even though I understand how your brain can be exhausted past the point of caring. When I first started bartending, I was disgusted by the icky things customers leave in their pint glasses, and then one day, while throwing away a beer-soaked tissue wrapped around a chicken wing, I realized none of it bothered me anymore.
“You know how cats leave presents when you feed them?” Aubrey asks, pacing as she talks. “I think that’s what Cory wants to do, but he can’t not eat them. Like those people from the Depression who turned into hoarders. I give him cat food now, but I think he still worries.”
“Where is he?” I ask.
“He usually comes back around nine or ten,” she says, which means she’s here at nine or ten often enough to know. “Hey, I’m going to bed. Do you have a phone?”
“Yeah.”
She walks back to me, puts her hand out. “I’ll give you my number so you can text if you need help.”
“It’s ancient,” I say, tugging my battered Nokia out of my pocket. “It doesn’t text.”
She rolls her eyes and takes it from me, pressing her number into the keypad. “Fine, you can call. I won’t answer, but I’ll come down if it rings.”
After Aubrey goes to bed, I eat the sandwich. It’s lukewarm, the mayo and cheese congealed. But it’s better than nothing. I’m guessing Aubrey didn’t mean to be carrying a sandwich around in her bag this whole time. She meant to eat dinner and do homework.
I want to get up and grab a book from the bookshelf, but I know it’s going to hurt too much. I don’t even bother taking my pain pills because they’re in the other room. I don’t have to pee—I haven’t had enough fluids to make that happen. I switch the light off and try really hard to smell the clean blanket instead of the dusty couch so maybe I can forget where I am.
Sometime in the night, Coriolanus jumps on the couch, wedging his body alongside mine, purring madly. I wonder if he’s going to bite me. I wonder if he remembers who I am. I wonder if he’s covered in ticks and now I’ll get Lyme disease. But I can’t bring myself to kick him off the couch. He was my friend.
“I’m sorry I left you,” I say. “Anus.”
I hope Aubrey can’t hear me laugh from upstairs, because it’s such a stupid thing to laugh about.