Authors: Charlotte Bacon

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #test

A Private State: Stories (10 page)

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speak much English. In Louisiana, Mrs. Vong fed me soups of clear noodles. Señora Lopez in L.A. braided my hair. Sometimes I'd help them iron, make dinner in kitchens that smelled of continents I'd never seen or leaf through photo albums while they explained in Lao or Spanish who these people were. I'd nod as if I understood, which in a way, I did. Those afternoons, I thought I knew what home felt like, and it was a difficult place where you felt complete and full of longing all at once. It was only when I waved good night to the Dusseaults that I remembered to look through the hedge. The Loiseaus were still away.

That night, I colored my hair "Everyone Loves Scarlet." The dye stung more than lemons and sheathed the sink in transparent, exciting maroon. It looked awful. I ruined one of Naomi's monogrammed towels. My father said, "Good Christ." Madame said, "Très joli," but she was just being kind.

People could get used to change. Mr. Dusseault was casual with the hand that had the big raw scar. He even chopped wood, though much more slowly. I helped him pile logs and was getting sleepy and calm in the sun when I noticed a flash of light on metal. The Loiseaus' car was back. Jake sat on the porch, staring at something far away.

All night, I lay inside the quiet and thought about sitting next to him on that sofa, his legs grazing mine. His big-knuckled hand in my palm. I didn't think he'd spoken much that summer, either. But all I'd have to do was call "Jake" through the hedge and he'd look straight at me. He wouldn't be able to help himself. Names were like that. They tugged you into the world. August was going to have a different color.

Temperatures worthy of Florida accompanied the new month. People from Maine faded as thoroughly as lettuce, but the Doctor and I had learned a southern technique. Washcloths and towels chilled in a bowl of water in the fridge, ready to be draped on

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the body's areas most sensitive to cold. Naomi, who still hadn't phoned, would have hated this heat, but I'd heard it was even worse in Omaha. A filmy scarf of moths rasped against the screen.

The Doctor and I lay on chaise longues in our bandages. Rolling his beer can across his forehead, he said, "Got a call from your mom today." I sat up and a line of water from my neck cloth twisted its way down my back. He never called Naomi "Mom." "She's going to spend the fall out there. Pulling things together." He took a sip of beer. At first, he'd crammed the places I was meant to talk with too many words to describe a simple event. Now, after a month, he seemed to finger the space my answer would have filled, trying to test its exact shape. "Chloe?''

My body cast a block over Louis's bony shadow. "Naomi won't be coming home," the Doctor said. "We've got to pack her stuff and send it out." I stood, picked up a wet cloth and threw it so hard against the screen the moth scarf sprang into the night. I felt a wave in my chest that would have been, if I hadn't stopped talking, a yell that said, "She's supposed to come back." All we needed was a rest. My father watched me, and it was hard to believe he'd ever helped anyone win anything his whole life, much less made a broken bone lie straight. I sat back down and passed him a fresh towel. "Thank you, baby,'' he said and mopped his face. The screen quit trembling and the moths were floating back when I snapped off the light.

There was no just packing Naomi up. You could box her knives, blouses, and handbags and still she was there, her habits fluttering through my day. The fog of her chamomile facials. The Billie Holliday she played on Sundays. "Just leave," I shouted at her in my head. I applied another layer of "Everyone Loves Scarlet." I tore up hankies that I knew she'd miss.

It was a Saturday of tall, thick heat. The last packages stood on the porch. The Doctor was the color of ash at the bottom of a barbecue. I had to decide something then. I picked up the marker he'd used to write our return address and jotted, "Want to go to

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the beach?" The pen felt strange in my hand, though I liked drawing the question mark. "Sure," he said, "sure, hon" and I could tell it helped him to act like a normal family faced with a sunny weekend.

The sand was jammed, with Québecois and Mainers spread far as the tide allowed. The Doctor had gathered the energy to find trunks and a pair of flipflops I remembered from Pensacola, but once settled on the beach, he didn't shift from the umbrella. He lay there, staring at its plastic ribs. Naomi had bought it from a catalog. At the time, we'd lived nowhere near a coast.

That was enough to send me straight to the ocean where I let the cold smack the breath from me. If my heels and hands didn't dip below the top layer, I could nearly pretend to be warm. Salt spiked my hair into orange tentacles that Naomi would have been ashamed of. But she wasn't here anymore. She wasn't going to see this evolution of my style, which was both satisfying and not OK. Out here, however, I could handle it. It was all this good northern cold and big salt, shifting and rocking all around me, an atmosphere of sudden change. Then I felt the water roll below my body, looked up and saw a steep moving curve of wave. And then I was, abruptly, inside it.

The next thing I knew I was on my back and staring at the high blue curve of the sky. I thought I knew how those crabs thrown past the high-tide line might feel. Shocked and wasted. Every inch of my body pearled with sand. I sat up and seawater streamed from my mouth and nose. A stripe of kelp plastered my arm.

Fathers went on playing with children. A girl toddled past me with a green bucket and shovel in her hands. I was too old to be missed. The Doctor was probably still staring at the expensive umbrella. But I'd nearly drowned, I wanted to shout to someone. My heart beat unevenly. My breathing hadn't righted itself.

A blue flash of shorts danced past and I saw Jake, a box greasy with fries and hot dogs in his hands. He saw me and slowed on the way back to his friends. There were too many fries for one person.

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He had come with actual friends. I wanted nothing more than to crawl inside a shell and seal me and my ugly hair in. I could nearly see why Naomi had to go. When you were a wreck, it took courage to stay visible. "You OK?" Jake asked. I nodded. He crouched down. His shoulders were burned. He had beautiful knees. "Your cheek," he said, "is bleeding.''

In the sand, I wrote "I'M OK." He didn't seem to think it strange not to answer aloud. He just read my note in the beach. "You sure?" I nodded again, and he walked back to his friends. But he was by himself. It was just that he was thin and hungry.

I picked my way back to the Doctor. It rattled him, the sand, the cuts, something else I couldn't see. Maybe he'd hoped I was too big to get hurt anymore. Maybe he didn't like it that he still had to watch for me. I cried then, shaking, nearly soundless, the way I cried when I was lost on a beach in a state I didn't remember and for once they'd both been worried sick. "Honey," he said, over and over, fingers dusting the sand from my back, as if I were something he could break if he weren't careful.

My father said he was sorry he had to go to the hospital and I believed him. He'd cleaned my scrapes, made me tuna sandwiches, and kissed my rough hair. There was an experimental lightness to his walk. The moths were late. I wondered if it was because we'd sent the last boxes. I wondered if it was because I'd been deeply tumbled in the North Atlantic.

Then I heard the gate creak and saw Jake and his long shadow standing there. I hadn't realized he knew where we lived, but that was how towns were. If you stayed long enough, people did know things, for better or for worse. "Can I come in?" he said. He waited 'til I waved to open the door. "You're not talking, right? That's what Mr. Dusseault said." I nodded and coughed, ocean still in my lungs. His hair was wet. A part sang down his scalp. At least we were both clean this time.

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"You got wrecked out there," he said. I shrugged, but I wanted to say, "Not
wrecked
; just a little roughed up." I hadn't broken any bones or knocked out teeth, had I? I was still whole, wasn't I? Besides, it wasn't personal. Oceans were just that way.

Jake wandered up to Louis and gently touched his ribs. "This is weird, your skeleton on the porch." I pointed to a chair across from me. He sat down and said, "He's missing some metatarsals." I offered him my iced tea. He sipped it. "That's good,'' he said and that was all for a bit. We sat there, listening to mosquitoes, cats, and sprinklers. He was easy with quiet; it had a curvy softness to it when he was around. It was better than words and so I was surprised when he asked, just as it was getting dark, "You go to the beach a lot this summer?" I shook my head. "Me neither; we were out West the whole time. My Dad and I spent a week in the Grand Canyon. You've got to move carefully in there.''

I had already broken my vow. Still it surprised me how nice it felt to take that black marker and print "Why?" in block letters. I could have written all night; there were rolls of paper and jars of pens left over from wrapping Naomi's stuff. I slid my note to Jake.

"Why," he read. "Because it's so big that even little sounds pop these big echoes. It was great but I was glad we were coming back." He looked away then, a little shy. Even when a place was home it wasn't simple. Things were always shifting.

I had questions, I realized. Did his father know Naomi was in Omaha? Then it struck me I didn't know what had happened to Jake's mother. Where was she? I was tired all over. I wasn't ready for this. One word, one thought led to another and then another, a long thick wave of them you had to ride.

Then Jake said, more to the twilight than to me, "I've been wondering something. What happened to Mr. Dusseault's thumb? Where'd they put it?" I hadn't thought about that. I wrote another scrap, "Ask him?"

Jake leaned close to read this next note. "How could you ask

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someone something like that?" Monsieur, I wanted to say, could stand strange questions. In fact, it would be good to ask him. He'd lost a critical piece, but it hadn't made him run.

The wind was blowing harder now. Louis clanked on his metal pole. He was going to drop a pin in his knee quite soon. Even the springs spanning the plates of his skull were starting to stretch. "Chloe?" Jake said. Hearing him say my name shook me as happily as if he'd touched me. "You know what the bones are called?" I nodded. So he was serious about this becoming conversation and in a rush as quick as the wave, I wanted Naomi there to tell me what to do. But Naomi wasn't very good with men and all their complications, either. Maybe no one was. Maybe that was part of it: you had to find the words that linked you to this new piece of life alone.

Jake held the length of the shin and said, "This one's a tibia, right?" Tapping at the thigh, he said, "And this is the femur?" And he worked slowly up the body, through the pelvic ring, the arms and ribs. I nodded each time. His fingers rested on the clavicle. We were close enough that even in the dark I could see that his nails were bitten to the quick.

Then he pulled me to my feet, fingers on my elbows, careful with me. We were the same height and as bony as the other. He'd grown over the summer and hadn't settled into his new inches yet. It would hurt if our bodies touched. My skin was scraped, his was peeling. "What's this one?" Jake asked and tapped the fragile plastic sternum, the spear-shaped plate my father said protected only one-third of the heart. The rest was exposed. There was only so much a skeleton could do. "Chloe," Jake said. "What's it called?" He tapped again.

"Sternum," I said, because breastbone, more familiar, was so naked for a first word.

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Safe as Houses

The bathroom walls were finally clean, except for the rusty cloud a leak had left behind. Elizabeth sat on the edge of the tub, took a bare foot in her hand and rubbed the arch. It was speckled with chips of purple enamel, paint that most likely came from the family who'd drawn the Pegasus in the attic one dreamy evening in the '60s. Damp curls of different wallpapers lay on the floor. One family had picked midget cardinals in profile. Another chose slashes of bamboo shading silver pagodas.

A year ago, Elizabeth, Andrew, and their daughter, Kate, had moved to this white house at a calm remove from New York. She was still unearthing traces of old occupants: a dog toy in the basement, mittens behind radiators. There were other, more alluring clues. A wedding album with missing pages, the groom in hornrims, the bride with pale, marcelled hair. A pair of kidskin gloves, the leather nibbled.

Her own family's things had slowly rooted in place. Andrew's clematis. Kate's dollhouse which held a plastic boy named Spot and his shelter for homeless cats. You lifted sofa cushions these days and found pencils and dimes. Elizabeth was starting to feel safe here. Her toes sank into the blue fuzz of the bathmat.

If Andrew had been in charge of this job, he would have slapped up the paint, then opened the window to let the breeze clear out the smell. He had felt at home with crisp immediacy, but

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