When we talk to the dead, p.3
When We Talk to the Dead, page 3
Focused on not feeling what she felt as she watched her best friends fall into their bubble, it took Sally a second to realize the sound of laughter she heard was coming from her.
They looked at Sally, pleased, thinking she was embarrassed, confirming their suspicion of her feelings for Ty. With their eyes on her, Sally kept laughing a joyless hysterical cackle.
Then Sally blurted it out. “My mother’s dead!”
Sally stopped laughing. Her friends stared at her.
Then the demented laughter started again. Sally couldn’t stop, like vomiting rancid food.
Sally saw how they looked at her, the way you might if you came across a sick animal in the wild. After a moment, they moved. Maeve, then Omisha, wrapping Sally in their arms. It felt so necessary that Sally didn’t notice as her hysterical laughter morphed. Not so much crying as a kind of heaving yowling wail as she sank to her knees.
* * *
Sally goes downstairs into the dining area at the B and B, where they have a self-serve breakfast, several little tables, a couple of other guests. Dad and Jivani are at one. Sally slips in without drawing their attention, goes around the corner to the room with the buffet, trays of eggs and meats on heaters, cereals, breads. She pours a measure of batter into a waffle iron, sets it to dark. As she waits, she leans against the doorway, watches. Dad has a half-eaten plate piled with eggs, breakfast sausages, bacon, toast. Jivani has nothing. They’re in the middle of a conversation, voices tense.
“—I thought I’d let you sleep,” Dad says.
“Mm,” Jivani hums to let him know she has other thoughts about why he didn’t wake her.
“You’re staring at my plate. Let me get you some food,” Dad says.
“That’s not why I’m staring at your plate.”
Dad sighs, knows what she’s getting at.
“It’s like watching a person eat a heart attack.”
Sally watches Dad’s face shift. From annoyed to embarrassed, getting caught doing what people do at all-you-can-eat buffets, letting their gross part take over.
Sally thinks, sometimes watching a marriage is depressing.
Jivani lays in. “It’s not just about you. Do you want your daughter to know you?”
“My daughter knows me.”
“She hasn’t even met you.” Jivani catches herself. “You know what I mean. This one,” she says, touching her stomach.
There’s how it feels overhearing Jivani momentarily forget Sally exists, and there’s how it feels finding out she’ll be having a sister. Last Sally heard, they didn’t want to know the sex—they made a whole thing about meeting the baby without preconceptions. Clearly, they’ve reconsidered and kept the news to themselves. It’s fine, Sally supposes. It’s their right. But something about it makes her realize she is the daughter until their baby is born. Then the baby will be the daughter, and Sally will be the other daughter.
Dad puts his sausage links and bacon in his napkin to show he won’t eat them. “Okay?”
“What?” Jivani says, reading some look Dad made that Sally didn’t catch.
“I have that appointment,” Dad says.
“I know,” Jivani says.
“What?” Dad says. Now he reads a look Jivani gave that Sally didn’t catch.
Jivani looks at the table. “You haven’t changed your mind.” Then she glares at him, hard.
Dad closes his eyes. “Can we not?”
Jivani’s face is red. She keeps her voice low but packs in the anger. “This isn’t all about you.” She touches her stomach to be clear on her point. “I know that’s why you didn’t wake me, so you could just go off and do what you please.”
“It’s for a good cause. You’re an environmentalist.”
“Such an ethical person you are to scarf down pounds of factory farm cruelty-infused pork.”
“I’m not eating them!”
A mother from a family nearby glances at them.
Jivani shakes her head. She is livid.
Dad leans across the small table, tries to hug her.
She pushes him away. “Millions,” she says. “It could mean millions for us, and you’re giving it away for some endangered sand flea.”
“Piping plover,” Dad says. “But this will also ensure the habitats of many others. Sandpipers, killdeers, woodcocks.”
Sally has no idea what they’re talking about. She really wants to know.
The waffle iron makes a loud ding that it is done. Dad and Jivani turn to the sound.
“Hey,” Sally says, like she’s not a creep who’s been watching the whole time. She waves.
Sally’s interruption allows Dad to stand, to move away from the tense conversation with his wife. “Going for a run?”
Sally has on running tights, sneakers. She hadn’t planned on a run—they’re just what she pulled on—but she should. Her school’s running club has an intercollegiate meet this week.
Dad squeezes Sally’s shoulder, his way of checking in with her. She nods that she’s fine.
Dad looks at Jivani; she won’t meet his eyes.
He turns back to Sally. “Could you get your stepmom something to eat?” He leaves.
Jivani gives Sally her prim smile. “Thank you, I’m fine.”
“Cool.” Sally dips in, grabs her waffle, grabs a banana. She doesn’t want to, but she sits.
After a brief silence, Jivani says, “To lose a mother is a hard thing, even—”
“Yup,” Sally says, cutting her off. Wanting to change the subject, she slides the banana to her stepmom.
Jivani doesn’t look at the banana. “—even when they don’t deserve the title.”
Though maybe it’s true, Sally finds it a shocking thing for her to say. To her friends, Sally passes off being indifferent about her stepmom. Even the title stepmom is something she never uses, usually calling her “my dad’s wife.” Sally mocks the cringey appropriation; taking the name Jivani when you’re Joyce Clodfelter is as opposite of Hindu as you can get. But the truth is, she riles up a strong feeling in Sally that she never names. There the feeling was, the summer before tenth grade, when they told Sally, after years of legal wrangling, Dad had his marriage to her mother annulled. The news made Sally’s gut lurch and twist, but it made sense. Mom was as much Dad’s wife as she was a mother to her. Sally hadn’t understood why Jivani was sitting down with Dad to tell her this until she saw how they then looked at one another, Dad taking Jivani’s hand, and Sally realized this chat wasn’t about her mom so much as it was about what came next, letting her know they were getting married. The feeling was there last September when Sally, packing for sophomore year of college, went to their bathroom to steal some of Jivani’s hair products and saw the positive pregnancy test in the trash can. Now, here again, is the same foul, nameless feeling as Jivani says how it must be to have lost a mother even if she didn’t deserve the title. It’s overwhelming, like a spinning ball of shards slicing through Sally. She wants her stepmom to feel bad things, terrible, inescapable things.
But Jivani’s face shifts. She concentrates on the banana to hold something in. She looks up, her face filled with sadness. For Sally, Sally thinks. For herself, it seems.
Mostly, Jivani’s face is a tight thing, but it’s now softened enough for Sally to see her in a way she usually doesn’t. Sally realizes why Jivani felt she could say that about her mom. Jivani’s mother, having trained in her own youth, taught Jivani ballet. Determined to make her daughter the success she wasn’t, her mother was violent. She hit, she yelled, she made then-Joyce dance for hours through broken toes and belt welts. Jivani tells many stories—rising from the corps de whatever to soloist to principal by twenty-two, the prima ballerina at the place in Pittsburgh, fourteenth best company in the country—but she never tells the painful ones. The bits Sally has have come from Dad, quick asides not to be shared or discussed but to explain some quality of her stepmom. Things like loud sounds, or if Jivani comes into a room and hadn’t realized you’re there, the way her whole body goes rigid and pale, neck stiff with taught cords of muscle.
Sally feels herself soaking up the sadness Jivani feels for her, sadness she understands in her own way. She wants more. “You get it,” Sally confides. “From what little Dad’s told me.”
Jivani’s face instantly gathers back to its perfect walled-up state. She gives Sally her tight glass smile. She slides the banana back to her stepdaughter, glancing at her waffle. “Please eat something more that isn’t just empty calories.” She gives Sally a look, then leaves.
* * *
Outside, eating the waffle wrapped like a bun around the banana, Sally walks a pathway lined with trees and houses like a postcard, trying to shake the worry that she’s a terrible person. It’s the intensity of the feeling she sometimes has for Jivani, less a feeling and more like waking a deformed thing that lives inside her. And now, as they have for days, horrific visions of the nightmare she shared with Stanley fill her thoughts.
Sally quickens her step, desperate to escape her thoughts. And since yesterday, a new image that she carries in her brain. Her mother in a pit. And with that, a haunted fantasy. Imagining Mom’s dead eyes looking up at Sally through the black shroud and thinking what Sally has long feared as her mother’s child: You are me.
Sally runs to flee her thoughts. Just then, a small black cat lunges out of a bush. He takes a couple of steps toward Sally, then walks away. He stops, looks over his shoulder.
He makes Sally laugh, relieved, the cat a godsend. “Want me to follow, kitty?”
He’s got a bent tail, a funny sway with his back legs, walking slightly sideways. He must have been hurt at some time, hit by a car, something, the back parts of him broken and healed wrong. The cat scampers ahead, Sally follows. They walk this way, enter a business district. He trots into a doorway. Sally reaches the storefront, a used bookstore. She thinks he must be the store cat. She enters. It’s musty, dusty, an old lady sits at the counter smoking, reading a paper. She looks up, doesn’t say or nod hello, goes back to her paper. Sally walks through the store. There are cards with faded handwriting thumbtacked on different shelves. Fiction. Cookbook. Art. Local Interest. There are also towers stacked on the floor of mixed-up books. Sally finds the cat curled on a short stack in a pool of sun. She sits, pets him.
“My friend Maeve would love this place,” Sally says. “She’s a real book nut.” Sally’s charmed by the cat, who blinks at her with profoundly blank eyes.
Sally’s phone chimes, a text from Dad. Where are you?
She texts for a run.
A thumbs-up. Then he writes Long drive ahead. Back in 30 please.
Sally hearts his message.
The blinking ellipsis of him composing a new text. The dots vanish without a new message. Then, a moment later, How are you?
She writes u no … Then she writes but ok 2?
The dots of him composing a text, then they vanish. Again, dots, then gone. The third time, the ellipsis produces a message. I am here.
Sally writes k. thx. She’s going to leave it there, but then she writes not like I knew her real well. She writes, then deletes, lol.
She waits, but no more dots.
She strokes the cat. The cat stretches, enjoying the attention. Sally really likes animals, but she’s never asked for a pet. This strikes her as weird. She says to the cat, “I should go.”
He lifts his head like he understands. He jumps off the stack. His weird back hip makes him klutzy, he knocks the stack over. The crash spooks him, he dashes off.
Of the many books that fall on Sally is a thing called Witches, Murders, Ghosts & Curses of New England. She flips through. Haunted houses, sinister drawings enacting curses and horrors, old black-and-white photos of actual people, murderers and the murdered, ghosts.
The old lady is still hunched over a newspaper opened flat on the counter, cigarette in her mouth. Behind her, a NO SMOKING sign.
“I wanted to get this,” Sally says. She puts the book to the counter.
The old lady sizes her up. Sally is sure this is how she eyes all out-of-towners, but when you grow up looking at people a certain way, you don’t mistake the sensation of someone trying to figure you out. Sally’s skin is the color of wood (willow in the winter, gunstock oak in the summer). In the fourth grade, the man taking their school photos kept saying, “Such a cute girl. So exotic. Smile for me, honey, such lovely woody skin. Smile!”
It stuck in Sally’s head, and after school she was laughing about it with Maeve, pretending to be a walking tree. They used Sally’s dad’s computer, looked up wood samples. Maeve’s fair skin didn’t look like any of them, but holding an arm to the screen, Sally’s did. It felt weird. She couldn’t say why. There’d always been comments about her looks, not good or bad but how unusual, people wondering what she was. Then this happened the morning of sixth-grade school photos. Getting ready, brushing her teeth, she looked in the mirror. Her face, she suddenly saw in pieces. Like a Mr. Potato Head, it looked like a hodgepodge of features. The longer she stared, the further away Sally felt from the girl she saw in the mirror. She looked like Sally, but the longer she looked, the more she saw a girl the way she thought people saw her, a person who existed somewhere between other people, a person who existed somewhere you couldn’t quite place.
The old lady slides the book for a look. “Fifteen bucks. Eighteen. No. Twenty-two.”
Sally has a twenty and a five. Her friends make fun of her using cash like an old person. Sally hasn’t made the connection, but it’s something her dad, who fled his country when very young, instilled in her, relying on concrete things. But also it’s just who she is, the way she likes records or how she finds many things people enjoy, all the social media that comes and goes, tedious. “The cat should get a cut,” Sally jokes.
The old lady puts the money in the register, doesn’t make change, doesn’t respond.
Moved by a weird feeling that it is on her to make things okay, Sally can’t stop herself from countering the old lady’s nastiness by ingratiating with more friendly talk. “I followed him in here,” Sally says. Then, smiling, clarifying, “The store cat?”
“I don’t store cats. I sell books. Cats are sinister little fucks.”
What Sally remembers of her grandmother, who they’d see on visits to her mom until her grandmother died when Sally was eleven, is People up here are this way. Down-to-the-bone New England types, families going back generations. Like the land, battered by the North Atlantic, they’re craggy, tough, cold. Sally’s grandfather apparently kicked Sally’s dad in the balls when her mom brought him home—the way Dad looked, he wasn’t the right sort.
“That book’s no joke,” the old lady says. “You fucking kids think everything’s a fucking joke until life shoves it up your rear end.”
“Okay,” Sally says. “Thank you!” She opens the door.
“Right off the coast here, you can almost see it on clear days. Captain’s Island.”
Sally lets the opened door rest on her hip. “Captain’s Island.”
“Didn’t I just say that? Imagine our local shit of land in a book.” She laughs.
Sally leaves. Through the window, the old woman settles back, lights a new cigarette, returns to her newspaper. Behind her, the black cat jumps up on a shelf, lies down.
Sally takes a picture of the storefront, the window, the old lady, the cat behind her.
She receives a text from Dad. About ready to head back, please?
There is a breeze, the scent of salt. Sally’s nightmare at once returns. In it, this exact scent of salt. She shudders, feeling something lurking, feeling lured by an invisible force. Sally tells herself to head back to the B and B. But she instead follows the salted breeze to the edge of town. Worn steps to a small, rocky beach. She goes to the water’s edge, looks out. She spots a seal far out, his shiny head and ink-black eyes glistening in the sun before he goes under. This far up north, the chill of winter clings to early spring, the air is clear, and that mad old lady is right. You wouldn’t notice it if you weren’t looking, but on the horizon, a slender wavering haze of green.
Captain’s Island.
Isolated, uninhabited.
And Sally should know, because the last people to live there were her first family.
CHAPTER
4
Realize
WHEN THEY HIT the road, Jivani, who drives the first shift, suggests a podcast. Great! Dad says. Dad hates podcasts. She gives him a look, so Sally knows their fight’s still simmering.
Sally reads the chapter on the island. After, she slouches so her back is flat on the seat, and she stands the large book on her stomach like a wall. She puts in earbuds, video-calls Maeve. It’s nice to see her face, but Sally clearly woke her. When Maeve’s underslept, because of her milk-pale skin, she gets watery-purple circles under her eyes. Sally says, “I forgot how early it is! Sorry! I’ll call later.”
Maeve lets out a huge yawn, props her phone so she can lie on her side, praying hands beneath her cheek, head on her pillow, looking at Sally like they’re lovers. “How are you?”
“I feel like I’m in bed with you,” Sally says.
Maeve smiles sweetly. She looks at Sally, waits.
“It was weird,” Sally says, answering her actual question about the funeral.
“I bet.” When Sally says nothing more, Maeve says, “We could just sit here.”
She’s good that way, how she gets it.
After a minute, Maeve squeezes her eyes, groans. “I think I’m getting a migraine.”
Maeve always upgrades things—worry is panic, headache is migraine—but also, Sally knows Maeve gets hit hard every month. “Aunt Flo visiting?”
Maeve chuckles at Sally’s dorky euphemism. She yawns again, shakes her head no. “There was a rave by the lake. It was lame but fun, went late.”
