Prologue: Meet the players
Margaret
Smallest of small towns. No diner, no gas station. No light to stop at.
A plot of petunias near the welcome sign. Planted by my mother. It was her calling to keep flowers alive even in the worst soil.
She bulges with my pregnancy. Sweat rolls off her all the time now. Within the hour Mother will be forced to put down her shovel and drive to the hospital. And she will pray all the way there. Hail Mary, Our Father, punctuated by a gasp as her water breaks all over the inside of her beloved Chrysler.
She curses my absent father, curses the sky above, curses the exact change she doesn’t have for the tollbooth to the interstate.
Later, heaving herself into a wheelchair outside the hospital, she waits for someone to take her inside. Giving up, she finally rolls herself toward the automatic door, when it slides open, cool air blends into the heat.
She grunts as I tear my way out. Can’t wait to leave her water. Slipping like a flopping fish toward the floor. The custodian takes one look at my bloody mess and throws up into the flip top garbage can.
They wrap us both in starchy flannel, unnamed woman, unnamed child. She has fainted, I am howling. The nurses plug their ears with cotton as I go on and on.
I have caused her immeasurable pain. There is no doubt that I am my father’s daughter.
#
Nora
Cut out dolls in fancy dresses. I made them myself. This one’s name is Invincible Girl. She protects children all over the world. I picked up this molted reddish-brown feather on the way home from school. It was for her, my favorite paper doll; the finishing touch on a construction paper hat.
I believed she could protect anyone. Nothing was strong enough to stop Invincible Girl. Evil would run away at the sight of her.
Now she’s in a box, sent with all my old things from Father’s apartment. There’s an arrowhead, a coin from 1883. My father’s lighter, complete with flints. He gave up smoking years ago, but that didn’t save him.
This is the last of it. Packed and mailed to myself a week ago. Arriving today like a package from the Devil. I heard once that you shouldn’t make rash decisions about personal items for at least a year after someone dies. I’d madly purged my mother’s items and regretted it. His things, I’ll try and be more patient with them. Rent a storage unit. Be more caring, less harsh. New leaf and all that.
Today there’s nothing left to do but light a smoke in his name and dangle off my terrace watching the ash blow to earth. Think I’ll go stitch up a little black handkerchief to keep in my breast pocket. In his memory. Maybe that’s what I need.
#
Edward
I listened to cooing every night when I was seven. The sounds were sweet, filling the darkness. The closer I got to them, the more their noises sounded like a one-note song; a lullaby of sorts.
My broken-nosed neighbor built the coop himself. As a result, the roof of our apartment building was like a luxury hotel on the pigeon map. A safe haven, a place to spend the night before travelling onward.
I imagined they carried messages, love letters, secret maps and documents. He had Racing Homers and Tiplers. A few were almost entirely white, but most were a violet so deep they were practically black.
Neighbor David, half-crazy on the inside, had survived the war--in body at least--so the other tenants let him do what he wanted. Every night I helped run the hose to fill the water pans while he fed them dinner. Our summertime ritual included eating lime sherbet out of yellow plastic bowls when we were done with our chores. In the winter we just hurried back inside and said goodnight.
It seemed to me that David taught the birds to have adventures, see the world, then come back. They would return with messages in the silver canisters attached to their legs. I was fascinated. Once the container held a map, but we never did find the buried coins it promised. David would talk for hours, spinning tales about where the various birds went.
“This fella’s been to China,” he began, “Got him a lady friend there. Brought her a piece of genuine Manhattan bagel. Stayed fresh all the way.”
One day I decided it was my turn to tell the evening’s story. I held a white and black female named Ella in my hands; my tale would be about her.
“Ella’s got a cousin, Louella, who lives in London. Tourists feed her bits of cheese and now she’s so fat she can’t fly. Her family has to go all the way to England to visit.”
David’s face squished up like he had eaten something bad.
“She ain’t got any family. They all got napalmed.”
“What’s napalm?” I had never heard of it. My parents were big fans of keeping children surrounded by children’s words, not adult concepts.
“A government mistake. It hurt soldiers, burned people up. Set them on fire.”
He shut his eyes tightly. I thought of the burning maple wood in the fireplace of our vacation cabin. The sparks would sometimes hit my clothing and make pinprick holes.
“Napalm would make a fireball higher than a house.” He said, “It sucked up everything in its path and destroyed it. I saw a buddy of mine go up in flames. I could hear him calling out for his mommy when he was on fire.”
David walked away from me, his work boots tapping on the metal of the roof. I imagined a truck full of firemen rushing along for a rescue, flooding his friend with water from a thick hose.
“That’s what Napalm is, Edward.” He muttered and left me alone on the roof, staring at the coop and several lines of laundry drying.
My story was nothing compared to reality. I understand that now. In the future I would have to do better.
#
Anna
If I held my breath, I could reach the quarter at the bottom of the pool. And if I could do that, I’d be rich.
All morning I’d been teasing myself. Walking along the edge of the water, curling my toes over the side. Feeling the grit of the rough concrete bite my skin.
The sun shifted and glinted off the coin. I wanted it so badly, wanted the ice cream it would buy me. Pistachio, peppermint stick or black cherry—my favorites. Even though sometimes there were pieces of pit that would bang against my teeth in the cherry flavor.
My older brothers dove and dunked each other. They tossed rings and kickboards across the water, hoping to bruise anybody unlucky enough to surface at the wrong moment. The money was mine. They hadn’t seen it.
Be brave, go in, get wet. You like baths. You love showers. Get in, get in. I dove feet first, belly smacking against the water. Not graceful. Water in my nose, water in my ears, water over my head.
My arms went automatic, thrashing. Churning me down. I could see the sun overhead, the legs of someone doing laps, a lady reading in her chair. The air, I couldn’t get to the air.
It was so far above me now. The coin was closer. I fell toward it. Slipping quietly, muffled. My fingertips made contact. My treasure. I shut my eyes and thought about eating the bottom tip off the cone and sucking the melting black cherry ice cream out.
My brothers came toward me like a school of sharks and each grabbed a limb. They lifted me upward, until they had me out of the water completely. We were performing a crazy water ballet—where something was wrong. Like Esther Williams in drag. Like a wild drug trip of synchronization.
They passed me shoulder to shoulder until the end of the line, then I continued into the lifeguard’s arms. I wanted to stay with him. Have him keep holding me snug, his smell of chlorine drifting about us. I kept my eyes closed, pretending I was a mermaid and he was a sailor. His mouth touched mine and he drew the briny sea out of me. It was the happiest I’ve been yet. Even at the age of four, I pretended.