Fierce Little Thing Read online

  But not everyone loved how readily we’d been welcomed. I’d passed the garden just the day before, and only after I’d gone by, remembered I’d forgotten to tell Issy where I was going. So I turned back, just in time to hear Amos tell Gabby that if money didn’t have any sway in the Unthinged World, Philip and Xavier and I would still be sleeping in front of the Main Lodge’s fireplace. At the sight of me, Gabby frowned, and Amos went back to weeding.

  Our tidy cabin was in the collection of buildings Ephraim was fixing up, close to the lake. We were not supposed to call it “ours”—that was Thinging—but when the word accidentally tumbled off our tongues, no one but Amos seemed to care. From the open windows one could hear the slosh of the water down along the dock, and the cry of the djembe and the strains of a guitar carried down from the bonfire. We were lucky that the metal screens were intact; the mosquitos were ravenous.

  “It’s just so strange that Philip would give his money away like that,” I said. “Don’t you wonder why?” The knock of Xavier’s elbow on the wall shivered by my ear.

  The cabin had been subdivided with knotty sheets of plywood, giving the illusion of privacy. The small front area held a dusty armchair and a firewood box and a stone hearth that coughed up smoke. Philip slept in the back, on a mattress on the floor, with a bold family of mice for roommates. Xavier and I were in the middle “room,” just a little bigger than the built-in bunk bed. Our belongings covered what little floor space we had, since being rescued from near the latrine. (Nora had been made to peel three hundred potatoes on the day Amos found the ransacked suitcases. But I couldn’t help thinking there’d been an additional, private punishment, exacted behind closed doors. I recognized the weight of Ephraim’s fist upon the breakfast table, and the wide-eyed skittering with which Nora backed away from it. When I told Xavier, he said good, she deserved a good wallop for stealing our luggage—a phrase for which I hated him.)

  T-shirts and underpants and jeans we would have called dirty in our other life, we now wore day after day, since discovering that laundry involved hauling water from the lake, plunging our hands again and again into the cold bucket, and rasping goat’s milk soap over the sodden fabric along the washboard—all while our knuckles turned raw. It was better to just rinse out your underpants when they started to smell.

  Despite the laundry and latrine situation, I was glad to stay. But I couldn’t help wonder what was in it for Philip. “Why do you think he likes it here so much?” In New York, his consumption was Dionysian: of butter and vodka, cheese fries and chocolate, pasta and cake, and plenty of illicit substances I wasn’t allowed to see. Home was crawling with teetotalers, and what little there was to eat was green, fermented, and whole grained. Yet he rhapsodized about the purple dawn and the slate hue of the cloud cover. He’d driven to Portland for a roll of canvas and taken to painting small panels of color to replicate sky or water or earth.

  “What does your mom say?” Xavier walked down to JimBob’s every Saturday for a phone call with Jane, but Ben had told Issy that for the past two weeks, Jane hadn’t been there when Xavier called. Of course, he hadn’t mentioned anything to me. He moaned from the bottom bunk.

  “Dinner was kind of … wet tonight, huh?” I said. Xavier was not a fan of lentils. “Issy says you should keep a secret stash of junk food. That’s what she’d do if she had the taste for it. She doesn’t even know what Doritos taste like.”

  “Issy’s a freak.”

  Fury streaked through me. “Ben’s a freak.”

  Xavier’s feet slapped the floor. Then his head was right there in the darkness beside mine. “Despite the fashion choices, which are not his, Ben is cool. He knows how to skin a rabbit.”

  I would never say out loud how cold Ben was, and cruel. I would never suffer the indignity of describing how he sat wherever I wasn’t and frowned whenever I tried to make Issy laugh. He was using Xavier, turning him against me, and Xavier didn’t even care. I would never say how disgusted I was by my desire to be liked by someone whose feet stunk terribly whenever he kicked his stupid boots off, or how humiliatingly nice it had been when he looked at me as he moved aside on the path. Instead I said, “I take that back. Ben’s an asshole.”

  Xavier pulled on a sweatshirt. The stench of mildew hung in the room long after he went into the night.

  37

  It’s a child.

  Black curly hair, bare feet, red T-shirt, a high shriek of laughter as it circles. Can I really smell it, all the way up here? Scalp, cheek, neck.

  There’s Issy, at my elbow. “Fuck naptime, I guess.”

  Maybe Xavier emailed a picture. It seemed so far away. All their lives do: the broken hearts; the mortgages; the jobs. What happens outside the gates is easy to ignore. So it was with this child: I believed I’d never lay eyes on it, so I allowed myself to forget. The child is the reason Issy cares what people think. Rather, Issy cares what the child thinks. She’ll do whatever it takes to keep what we did a secret, so that the child never has to know.

  Someone chases it into the light. Not Xavier; a woman. She darts quickly, threatening a tickle. The way she moves is familiar, and though she never wore her hair so short, I’d know her anywhere: the cinch of that waist. “You brought Cornelia?”

  “Oh sweetie, it is all hands on deck time.” Issy’s eyes are on the kid. “He’s pretty cute, huh?” The truth is, I’d already eat my own heart if his safety required it. Then Issy’s smile blooms, broad and beautiful. She knew I could not resist; that’s why she brought him along.

  38

  Three days later, Abraham announced he would take Philip’s money.

  Two days after that, Philip announced we were going back to New York.

  It didn’t make sense, not now that he’d gotten what he wanted. I appealed to Xavier to talk to him. “Well, I do really miss my mom,” Xavier said, choosing the side that wasn’t mine. I wanted to scream that with Jane skipping his phone calls, he should understand, better than anyone, that we were better off at Home, safe from the disappointments of the Thinged World. Then I realized I was thinking like Mother, so bit my tongue, actually bit it, and it bled.

  “I have to stay,” I said as Philip pulled longyi after longyi off the clothesline. I couldn’t tell him how close you were, that to leave you would be dying another death.

  I followed him inside. “They’re taking your money. Isn’t that what you wanted?” It was hot in the cabin—our cabin—after weeks of August sun. “And you’re painting such beautiful things here.” I didn’t want to weep, but perhaps that’s what would do it. “Please, Philip, we can’t leave now. Why now? When this finally feels like home?”

  He was about to cry; I could see it in the quiver at the corner of his lip. But he went into his room and didn’t look back. “I’m sorry, Saskia.” He kicked closed the door.

  Amos whittled an eagle beside the flagpole while I helped Philip pack the Lincoln. Issy watched from the step of the Main Lodge, her knuckles gripping the deck of cards. When our bags were in, she followed me onto the porch at the side of the lodge. The land and water unfurled away from us, a sunbaked promise of work and song and bread and birds. Nora and Tomas dashed by. Issy dealt.

  Spit: five stacks in front of both players, and two piles—which start out empty—in the middle. Both players yell “spit,” and, using only their right hands and the stacks in front of them, build up the piles in between them either up or down in numerical order. When one of the players runs out of cards, they slap the smaller pile. Then the whole thing starts again, until one of the players runs out of cards.

  For the millionth time, Issy beat me, but she didn’t even smile.

  I took the hatchet from under the porch, where I’d hidden it. It was a wonder Nora hadn’t sniffed it out yet. I thought, I’m Unthinging myself. Maybe Abraham would see this Unthinging and command Philip to let me stay. Issy took the hatchet without a thank-you, and rubber-banded the cards, and went down the slope.

  I stood in the stillness of t
he morning. I closed my eyes. I heard footsteps, slow over the pine needles. Abraham, I thought, coming to say goodbye. I let him stand there, let him see my bravery.

  “You’re really leaving?”

  My eyes startled open. Ben. I tried to make my voice sound breezy as I stepped off the porch. “You finally got rid of me.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “I’m out of your hair.”

  “Hey.” He got closer. “I’m sorry, hey, don’t cry.”

  “I’m not crying.” I brushed past him.

  “Can I explain?”

  Why did boys and men want to explain their meanness; wasn’t their meanness enough? I found solace in the car, filled with all the things we had learned not to care about. I hugged the glass jar filled with the Mother that Sarah insisted I bring along.

  We got to the city at sunset. The Thinged World was a decayed landscape of grays and browns: buildings, water, sky. How had I never noticed? Humid air hung over the garbage heap of human waste. Philip tapped the steering wheel to “Take the A Train.” Xavier was asleep, his gorgeous mouth hanging open as though he didn’t mind anything flying in.

  39

  Issy opens my window. “Hey down there!” My body shrinks back and the world rushes in: the flow of Acer rubrum’s leaves; Poecile atricapillus playing the same two notes; and below that, the drone of a far-off mower.

  “Mama!” I can’t see, but I know the boy’s hands are reaching up. “Mama, Mama!”

  “Is Saskia all right?” Cornelia’s voice carries judgment.

  “Still breathing.”

  “Mama!”

  “Come in,” Issy calls.

  40

  One step into the loft and we knew something was amiss. Jane’s Daubigny, that muddy composition of clouds and cows, was gone from its spot opposite the door.

  “Mom?”

  We found Jane’s cosmetics cabinet bare, as well as the shelves where she kept her jewel-toned cashmere sweaters. Xavier jogged toward the curtained area where she slept. Philip’s hand, gripping for the doorknob, was all I needed to understand why he’d brought us back—he had known she was leaving. He had hoped we would get here first. Between throaty sobs, he explained: Jane had fallen in love. She’d told him she wanted a separation in the spring, but he’d begged her to think things through—“for your sake, my darlings, for both of your sakes”—and that was why he had swept us off to Maine: “So she would miss us.”

  “You thought abandoning her would convince her to stay?” Xavier Frisbee’d his Star Wars plate at his father’s head. Philip ducked. The melamine clattered but refused to shatter. “Tell us where she is.”

  I fixed my face so it looked as though Jane mattered to me. Really, my insides were howling anew for the loss of Home, which was the loss of you, the only place you’d shown yourself since leaving. If Philip had brought us to Home only to get away, there was hardly any reason to take us back.

  Jane was living with her boyfriend on the Upper West Side. This boyfriend was younger than Philip. He worked in imports, which was how he and Jane had met, on a trip to Egypt. Philip glanced up at Xavier, a look of terror crossing his face as a helicopter hummed over the building, rattling the windows: “She’s pregnant, my darlings. She’s going to have his child.”

  41

  “Would you like to meet my son?” Issy asks.

  I need peace. I need quiet. I am a solitary creature. I want I hope I need for there to be no children. Children ruin things. I want to stay in this pink bedroom with Issy forever, both of us undistracted.

  But then, of course, with every aching bit of me: yes.

  42

  “You talk to our boy today?” Philip asked.

  I had, in fact, locked eyes with Xavier across the cafeteria, just before he laughed at a boy sticking a French fry up his nose. It seemed worse to tell Philip this detail than to swallow it with the instant oatmeal he offered. Somehow, in our absence, Jane had gotten Xavier and me admitted to the kind of school she approved of—uniforms, textbooks, lacrosse. Philip wouldn’t let me unenroll; he was desperate to look good in her eyes. It wasn’t a bad school; we were actually doing math. But Xavier wasn’t talking to me so I had no friends. Of course Philip didn’t know this, nor did he know that a photographer had started following me home, or that half the girls ignored me because of Daddy and the other half were obsessed with me because of Daddy, and that the boys called me “Spooky Saskia” (a relatively innocuous nickname, as these things go) and made ghostly sounds whenever I passed (which was, admittedly, better than having my bra snapped), and although I knew this was thanks to something Xavier must have told them about Daddy or about you, I had no idea what that something was, because the day after we returned to New York, Xavier had moved out.

  “He’s just visiting her,” Philip mumbled for the millionth time. “It’s not forever.” But we both knew that although Xavier had only taken a backpack with him, Jane’s apartment with her boyfriend on Central Park West was Xavier’s home now.

  Philip ate and drank and smoked more than he had before Home. He tore up the longyis for painting rags. Women slept over, many of them far too pretty. I got into bed every afternoon as soon as I finished my homework, grateful for the escape of sleep, and for the touch of Topsy in the spot between my bed and the wall. I fed the Mother as Sarah had taught me, but the glop grew thin and started to stink of acetone. I plopped her into the garbage and gagged.

  And you? You were gone—or rather, I was. I’d always thought it was worse to be left behind, but being the one who did the leaving certainly gave that experience a run for its money. You’d obviously stayed right where you finally felt at home, at Home. I tried not to think of you wandering those woods, leaving signs I wouldn’t find; even the gentle spot behind Topsy’s ears couldn’t soothe that.

  The urge to suck in Abraham—far away as he was—gaped raw in my mind, those few times, that is, that I allowed myself to fully imagine putting my face up to his eyes, cheekbones, nose, jaw, lips. It was better to imagine nothing. I devoured Jane Eyre. I limped through Wuthering Heights. I watched a lot of Star Trek. I was sure to be as boring as possible whenever the photographer followed me back to the loft, and although a few shots of me ended up in the papers, they didn’t make the boys meaner or the girls any more interested. I considered getting a job babysitting before I remembered all the reasons I shouldn’t.

  Did I think of getting on a bus to Portland? Did I consider hitchhiking along the scrubby back roads, past shuttered cottages and windswept lakes, toward the edge of the small town where JimBob’s sat, a fortress of road salt and potato chips? Yes, as other children fantasize a Disneyland vacation. But I had only a vague memory of the town nearest to Home and was afraid that if I looked at a map of Maine I would discover that there was no road leading up the mountain from JimBob’s, that Home and Abraham and Issy and the whole Unthinged World was something my terrible mind had drawn from thin air. And though I was livid at Philip for giving me the taste of new life only to rip it away, some part of me knew that if I ran away, his search for me would be halfhearted. I wouldn’t survive his abandonment.

  Meanwhile, he waxed poetic about Home to his girlfriends as though our time there had been a quaint vacation. He extolled Unthinging even as he invested in a new Harley. He started referring to Jane as “My Wife the Gaping Cunt” (for they were, apparently, still married). What I mean to say is he did his best.

  “You haven’t painted since the summer,” I said one cool Saturday evening when I caught Philip with his hands in his pockets, staring north toward the Empire State Building. I did not say, “Let’s go back.” Instead, I said, “I might visit Grandmother,” which was not what I expected to say. I tried my best to never think of Grandmother, but now that I’d announced the visit, it was the only logical next step. Grandmother had been distant, surely. But if Mother was her blood, then so was I, and Grandmother loved nothing so much as blood, except, perhaps, for money.

  43


  Without Issy, it might have been weeks before I made it downstairs again.

  Perhaps I’m being dramatic. A descent to the first floor would be unpleasant, but I’d manage. I’d have to; otherwise, the last of the Mother would die.

  On the stairs, an orange square of sunlight lights my hand, the same color that filtered into the Devil’s Ramble when I slipped into it at last. That blessed glow had come back in the time it took me to make it from the house, into the purple leaves. I didn’t look back. I grasped at a trunk to catch my breath. I moved into the lurking forest.

  Issy’s arm is firm under my touch, and I have, for the moment, the sensation that she is carrying me, that I owe her a great debt of gratitude—until I remember that her and Xavier’s and Cornelia’s arrival is the reason I am undone.

  44

  The metal gate swept open. I’d taken the Metro-North from the city and then a taxi from the station. As I pulled up Grandmother’s long drive, I thought myself quite sophisticated for asking the driver to idle under the porte cochere.

  Miriam let me in. “You want a biscuit?” She meant a cookie. The house smelled of floor wax and mothballs and Grandmother’s horehound candy. Your lack, inside those walls, felt like a physical weight, one that pressed so hard on my shoulders that I thought, for a moment, I might faint.

  We heard Grandmother at the top of the stairs. Miriam hurried me from the foyer into the parlor, and had me sit in the wingback chair. No cookie appeared. Grandmother took her time. When she finally entered, her hand flew from her brass-handled cane to her chest. “Is no one feeding you?”

  “Oh, Jane’s a great cook.” I hadn’t had a vegetable in months. I approached Grandmother’s brittle frame. Talcum powder was doing its best to mask the fresh urine, but I decided to notice, instead, how much taller I was now. She settled on the velvet settee. She motioned that I join her.