Annabelle
You don’t know what to photograph outside the buzz and bustle of school.
Everything inside your house has the look of something forlorn and forgotten, so you walk out to the factory ruins, stepping ever so carefully on the path with the camera around your neck.
You shoot the blank spaces where the windows used to be, which now frame slices of the sky.
On impulse you stick your hand far into the gap in the wall where you and Sabrina would leave one another messages, trinkets, where your mother placed those flowers and wooden animal figurines the day she left. Nothing but cold air, cold stone.
You tell yourself you hadn’t been hoping for anything and almost believe it.
Inside, you shoot the front hall and the last of the days’ light coming through the fan window, to try to capture the lonely feeling that squeezes your ribs as the light hits the wide plank floors that carried your ancestors over the threshold, toward the warmth of the hearth.
In her room Sabrina is playing music too loud with her door open, so you head up the stairs and pause in her doorway.
She refuses to turn from where she stands in front of the mirror, so you inch to the left, raise the camera, and take a picture of the two of you framed that way, you in the background, Sabrina leaning in to the mirror in front of you, the glint of a necklace bright against her skin.
She strokes the chain, flips her hair over her shoulder.
“Where’d you get the necklace?”
“The Coyote gave it to me,” she says, angling her chest toward the mirror.
You raise the camera again.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asks.
“Practicing. For yearbook.”
“Well go practice somewhere else. You’re supposed to take pictures of people doing things.
Not creeping around.” Her voice is hard but still, you detect the begrudging kernel of admiration, maybe even envy, as she eyes you from the mirror.
The necklace is pretty: gold and dainty and delicate, a star charm that sits in the hollow just below her throat.
Though you would never admit it to Sabrina, you agree that you need to find more people to practice on, so that weekend at the Cranberry Festival you bring the camera with you, walking three miles down the road toward the sound of music, notes of saxophone floating above the trees.
The festival takes place over two days, and every year since you and Sabrina were old enough to count change you would go with your mother and she would sell her tinctures from the garden, rub salves into people’s hands.
People would lean close and speak to her in confidential voices.
Do you have something for … My husband, he’s having trouble with …
My mother, her memory is going … And she would produce a bottle or pot of something from underneath the table, send them on their way.
They believed in her magic. You all did.
But where is she, and her magic, now that you need her more than ever before?
You had asked Sabrina if she wanted to come with you and she only sighed and looked down at her fingernails.
That constant hunger buzzes in you as you walk the fair, first past the hot rods and vintage trucks with their candy-colored paint jobs that glisten in the sun.
Snap, snap, snap with the camera. You have never before been so alive to smells and sounds of food.
The greasy sizzle of peppers and onions of the grill.
Powdered sugar you swear you can taste in the air when you walk past the funnel cake stand.
You walk the entire fair, partly convinced that you will see your mother as she always was, the cloth she dyed from beetroot spread over the card table, her hair long down her back, her sleeves rolled up and her hands glistening, greasy with poultices and salves.
Root of wild indigo for slow metabolisms, poor immune systems. Pipsissewa leaves for skin ailments.
The bark of wild cherry trees for sore muscles and bad lungs.
You’re walking with the camera braced in your hands when you hear a familiar voice.
The Coyote.
You see him, so different from the way he was in his car.
He’s standing in a circle of other men, all of them with cups of beer in their hands.
One of them is older and you recognize him as the chief of police.
He had been to the school last spring to shake the hands of every student who complete their D.A.R.E.
education. You are doing your part to help keep our community safe and maintain your own bright future.
At the time it made you swell with pride, to hold the certificate bearing his signature.
“And this idiot, he takes this turn on his four-wheeler like you wouldn’t believe, I swear, this close to flipping it…”
A man in a chambray shirt crosses his arms. “Fuck you, it wasn’t that bad.”
“It was, you moron. I saw your eyes under your helmet visor. About to pop out of your damn skull.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t been drunk off your ass…”
You watch the police chief for his reaction to this.
You remember more lines from his address to the assembly.
Drinking is trouble. Drugs are trouble. Quickest route to an early grave.
But he only tips his head back with the rest of them, squeezes the shoulder of the man they are all teasing, the one who was supposedly careening through the woods drunk.
There’s a younger man with them standing next to him, taking smaller sips of his beer.
You raise the camera to your eye, frame the shot, snap.
You edge closer, just as the Coyote steps out of the circle and toward the woods, where other men are standing with their backs to the crowd, streams of piss between their legs.
While you watch him another voice calls in your direction. “Hey there, sweetheart.”
You startle and the camera thumps against your body.
“Oh look, we’ve scared the poor thing. Would all of you shut up with your stories—we’ve got a lady present.
Damien, look, she seems about your age. Say hi.
” The man on the boy’s left slaps him on the back hard enough that he stumbles forward and some of the beer sloshes over the rim of his cup. The boy goes crimson.
All you can do is turn and run.
“Come back, sweetheart!” one of them calls after you. “He doesn’t bite.”
“Maybe she does,” someone else says, and they all laugh again as you retreat.
In your haste you bump into a woman carrying a tub of popcorn, who swears as it scatters at your feet.
Sorry, you say. Sorry sorry. But you don’t mean it—all you can think of is getting away from them, from the ugly, rough sounds of their laughter.
At the fortune teller’s booth a red-haired woman eyes you with curiosity from between a pair of cheap gold curtains and you have the urge to duck away from her view.
You walk until you find a bottle of cranberry wine abandoned against a tent stake, three-quarters full.
You bring the bottle to your mouth and drink as much as you can in one go, closing your eyes and willing whatever people are chasing when they drink to come to you: relief, lightness, oblivion.
But mostly, you want to forget the Coyote.
Forget the men and their barbs. You want to forget the look on Miss Hamilton’s face when she asked you if you were all right, and the sensation of bubbles rising in your guts.
You want to forget Sabrina turning her back to you when you brought the camera home on the bus.
No, maybe what you want to forget is Sabrina ever loving you, ever sharing your bed and whispering stories in your ear when you were afraid of the dark.
If you could forget that, you’d be free.
The wine makes the world softer at the edges, the lights on the carnival rides ringed in halos as the sun sets.
You stop at the funhouse mirror. Crimson stains at the edge of your mouth.
You take another picture, this garbled version of yourself, proportions all wrong.
Out of the corner of your vision you catch the whoosh of the tilt-o-whirl.
Girls scream as they are jerked in circles, hair flying.
You trudge back through the food stands.
Someone must have overturned a crate of cranberries and you crush them under your feet, the pop and give of the fruit bursting from inside its skin making you feel sick.
You look into the dark of the woods and wonder what would happen if you just started walking. If you might just disappear entirely into the ink-black night.
You are sitting with your back against a ticket booth, your eyes closed, when there’s a voice above you.
“Are you okay?”
It is the boy, the one who had been standing in the circle with the Coyote’s friends. He doesn’t bite.
You can only groan in response.
“I can give you a ride home, if you want. Sorry those guys were jerks.”
You manage to nod. “Home,” you say. He tells you his name and it’s like your mind is a sieve.
It slips through and is lost, the way the minutes leading up to this moment are lost, big black blots in your memory.
The lights of the amusements glow prettily against the dark sky.
You feel for the camera strap around your neck, think about taking a picture, but you can’t get your hands to work right.
He helps you up and the two of you walk through the field, toward the parked cars.
In the car he gives you a bottle of water. You start to take long, greedy gulps but he puts his hand out, stops you.
“Slow,” he says, “or else you’ll be sick. Ask me how I know.”
You like his smile, the easy sound of his voice. In another version of the world, you think, you would want to know him better. He’s older than you, but by just a few years.
“Rough day?”
“He’s such a … a … bastard,” you say, deploying the word for the first time but it feels immediately right.
Sabrina calls your father a bastard all the time.
You try not to think about him, or at least as he is now.
You still remember the years when he would lift you on his shoulders, hold your ankles tight and you would raise your head to the clouds, loving the sensation of being closer to the infinite sky.
“Who?”
“The guy you were with.”
The look on the boy’s face changes. “You … you too?”
You let yourself nod, though you wonder how he knows to ask. But his anger feels good, even secondhand. “My sister, too,” you say.
The boy looks up to the ceiling. You think you see tears forming in his eyes.
“Your sister … you have a twin, right? I’ve seen you guys around.”
You nod, wait for him to say something else, but he only drums his fingers against the steering wheel.
You fill the silence, suddenly protective of Sabrina. “She must be special though. He gave her a necklace. It’s pretty. A star inside a circle.”
“He did?” There’s a note of concern in his voice that you can’t parse, and then he sighs. “Let’s just get you home, okay?”
You make it about a mile before you need to be sick. He pulls over and you lean out of the car, retch onto the road.
“I’m sorry,” you say. He hands you a tissue for you to wipe your mouth with.
“You okay to get moving again?”
You don’t know what makes you do this, but you move your hand to your stomach as he watches. You are tired. Tired of not thinking about it or talking about it. Tired of being the only one to know. “I hope I didn’t hurt it,” you whisper.
For a second, he looks as though he’s been slapped, two spots of color on each cheek while the rest of his face goes white. Then, he throws the car into drive and takes the roads too fast, as though you are being chased.
The next morning you wake bleary, still nauseated, retch cranberry wine until you’re empty of anything but bile.
The memory of the car ride is hazy. You have the vague feeling of having said something you shouldn’t have, but can’t dredge it up from the swamp of your thoughts, the pressure on your skull too great.
You drink from the tap after getting sick and crawl back to bed. On your bedside table sits the camera out of its bag, the lens taking the mess of you in with its indifferent, one-eyed stare.