The Lonely (15 page)

Easter Story

Easter sat behind the screen door watching the ground bloat with rain. She wasn't the type of girl to be bothered by rain. In fact, she hated when nice days made her feel guilty about just wanting to stay inside. Little droplets clung to the wire screen, wild with the knowledge of being temporary. The sky was the suffocated white of bright sun fighting through clouds and as the door beaded more heavily with drops, a cross-stitch shadow began to appear on Easter's face.

The image shivered to life: a night at dinner, Easter's head on The Mother's lap, a candle about to make a smoldering exit via the ominously ebbing pool of wax surrounding it. An elbow is twitching, tickling Easter's ear. This must have been what woke her up. The elbow becomes a bangled arm becomes a slight wrist, a hand unsteadily gripping a long stemmed glass. It belonged to The Mother. They were both occupying the wide wicker loveseat that sat on the deck all summer and moved to the table when they barbequed.

The air was unfamiliar. Belonging to an hour that Easter rarely saw. Four in the morning, perhaps? An alien crispness. An impossible color. The Mother had been sitting there all night. Easter must have at some point made the barely conscious decision to stay up with her. The half-eaten casserole spoiled in the center of the table and three plates were set.

Easter was six years old and could still curl up comfortably on one cushion of a loveseat like a cat. She didn't want The Mother to know that she was awake. There was something secret about this moment. So she pretended that her ear had never been tickled by that slender, unsteady elbow.

The Mother was mumbling something. Her lips moving so slowly, so slightly, moving barely more than the raindrops shivering in the wire screen. The Lonely made her ugly and beautiful at once.

And of course you couldn't really tell all of that from the water-drop cross-stitch picture in the screen door. From the quivering picture in the screen door it just looked like a mother and a kid on a deck in the summer, no tickled ears or coagulated casserole or whispered mumblings to someone or no one. Then the raindrops, weak and exhausted from their time embedded in the wire, trickled to their deaths.

Easter thought about the way that pictures often failed her, incapable of telling a story in full, always missing the most important parts of a moment.

She remembered a picture she found in Phyllis the Fucking Bitch's basement. She'd brought it upstairs to examine over toast with jam. Three brothers in bathing suits, the tallest one holding a spewing hose proudly, each with wide grins on their young faces and wet, spiky hair. The picture was protected by a brown frame. Phyllis the Fucking Bitch's reflection appeared in the glass and Easter's lips parted slightly.

“Those are my cousin's boys,” Phyllis said.

“Oh,” Easter replied.

“Would you believe that they were all born without tongues?”

Easter's face dropped in shock. She furrowed her brow, trying to find some clue in the picture, but there was none. All of these boys born without tongues and you would never know. Easter shivered and Phyllis the Fucking Bitch's reflection disappeared.

The Smell

I decided that I needed to enlist some help if I was going to find what was causing The Smell. So I went outside to find Hector.

He was broiling in the sun, the air rippling off his warm black body. He lay on his back, the skin on his jowly face pooled around his upside-down skull, revealing his enormous teeth in a friendly way. I stepped into his sunlight, casting a tall shadow across his face. He looked up at me.

“Wanna come inside and help me find something?”

He rolled over lazily, shook the sleep from his head, and trotted behind me toward the cabin. He'd know what he was looking for as soon as he walked in.

He took a big sniff and went straight for the fancy dish cupboard, digging his way through, crashing teacups and small, useless dishes, burying his face in a large silver serving dish. After a few seconds he pulled something out and dropped it gingerly to the floor, leaving behind dollops of froth from the corners of his mouth.

A squirrel. Dead. Its small, round belly bloated with gas, eyes open and dry like little black beetles. His nose was pink, his fur all gray. With my hands overlapped on my mouth and nose, my eyes began to expand with tears. A squirrel tail without life is the saddest thing you could ever see. Without that vivacious electric eel inside, controlling the fluff, squirrel tails just looked like a sad pile of dust bunnies. And that was what I'd mistaken it for when I'd dug around in that cupboard.

“Thanks, Hector!” I warbled, not meaning it. “You're a good boy,” and I rubbed his neck.

Suddenly a tiny squeak severed his praise. This squirrel was alive! But just barely. Unfortunately, Hector was all business. As soon as he realized that the little thing was breathing, he scooped it up and crushed it in his big powerful jaws. A fast, merciful death, but still a gruesome one. He dropped the punctured thing at my feet, trotted back outside, and worked his way back into the spot where the grass was bent and imprinted with his once-sleeping shape to resume his nap.

I scooped up the lifeless bundle, laid it in a shoebox, wrapped the shoebox tight in electrical tape, and stuffed it in a bundle of hopefully odor-suppressing blankets in mine and Julia's attic room.

The Incident

I debated showing Julia the squirrel. When you take that kind of step in your life, becoming a person who hides dead animals in their room, it's kind of hard to come out about it. It's like telling your family you're a drug addict or something. People aren't going to take it very well, and it's not the most flattering thing in the world to be. So I waited.

I sat the whole day and night with the shoebox I'd put it in, watching, wondering if there was still a squirrel in there at all, wanting to unwrap it but scared. On the bed, with my legs crossed and the shoebox in my lap, I read a fairy tale from the big, stately Hans Christian Anderson book we kept up there. A story about a poor girl, little and cold and selling matches in the street. It was very late when Julia finally came home.

“You're still awake,” she said when she entered.

She spoke these words in such a way that I had absolutely no idea how she meant them.
You're
still awake: disappointed. You're still a
wake
: happy. You're
still
awake: impressed. But being awake isn't that impressive. Unless you'd been in a coma. I nodded because it seemed the best way to respond to something that you didn't really understand anyway. It was my usual response when hobos with no teeth or people with impossibly thick accents tried to communicate with me. Nod, nod, nod.

“What've you got on the bed there?” she asked, noticing my shoebox.

“I'll show you, but you have to promise not to freak out.”

“Oh god, Easter, what is it?”

I lifted the lid off the shoebox.

“What part of that was supposed to freak me out?”

It was empty. I was shocked. It had been there. I'd picked it up and placed it inside. I'd seen the small hole where Hector's tooth pierced his inflated little belly. Where had it gone? I looked around, scared. Hadn't I been watching the whole time? I peed once, for two minutes tops.

“I had a squirrel in here,” I finally said.

Julia looked alarmed. “Is it inside the house some-where?”

“No, it was dead.”

“Gross, man. What's wrong with you?”

“Nothing's wrong with me! There was this terrible smell, Julia, couldn't you smell it? Strong enough to make you gag. It was making The Mother insane. I looked everywhere and couldn't find it so I finally got Hector to help me and he found it, Julia! But it wasn't dead yet, it was just barely alive, but Hector could tell and you know what he's like, as soon as he heard it squeak he killed it.”

Then I had to concentrate for a moment not to cry.

“So you decided to peel the stinking dead squirrel off the floor and bring it into our room to show me?”

“Yeah!”

“You're insane. This is what happens when you spend too much time with that stupid dog.”

“I am
not
, Julia! I am not insane. I'm telling you, this squirrel was in the cupboard, he was in that big serving dish.”

Her eyebrows quivered, her mouth cracking at the corners. She was about to laugh.

“Goddammit, Julia, you put it there, didn't you! No wonder it's gone.”

She burst out laughing, so hard she could barely contain herself. She laughed herself backward, plopping onto a beanbag chair on the floor where she finally exhaled herself back into a normal state. Her legs made triangles with the floor.

“Why would you do that, Julia? Why would you make me think I was going crazy? Why are you such a terror?”

“Me? You've been so boring I can barely stand to look at you!”

“What else do you want from me? I picked you! I want you! Why are you still being so mean?”

“Maybe you did some serious damage, Easter. Maybe you hurt my feelings too much this time.”

I stared at her in the way that forces people to explain themselves further. So that's what Julia did.

“You think if you're normal, he'll like you more. You think if you bring a boy home he might even be jealous, or at least feel protective of you. But he won't, Easter. I'm the only family you've got. Why can't you see that?”

I felt guilty. Incapable of denying it because it was true. I'd been having fantasies of life without her, life without The Mother too. A house with just me and The Father, where he'd have to pay attention to me and he'd want to because I'd be my better self.

I kept quiet because I knew that if I tried to lie, she'd know. So she painted her face all smug, got up, shut off the light, and snuck under the covers on her side of the bed.

Besides the shoebox and the too-small bed, there were a few other things in our attic room. There was a desk with two drawers both filled with broken pencils and crayon nubs and crinkled pieces of paper of varying degrees of usefulness. There was a bookcase where our Hans Christian Anderson book lived, as well as lots of others that Julia and I would read from out loud on nights when it was too hot to sleep. There was a white nightstand with a lamp on it and a floral sheet dividing our room from a storage area filled with tent poles and camping stoves and inflatable mattresses.
A large box of matches peeked from beneath the sheet like a shoe. I thought of Lev's feet peeking beneath the cuffs of his jeans and I wished he were hiding behind the curtain, somehow able to see that I didn't want to be mean to him. That I had to be. Because I already had a Julia and there wasn't room for two people who thought I was wonderful.

In the middle of the night, after our fight, I heard Julia rustling behind it, her back end sticking out in front.

“Hey!” I hissed. “What are you doing back there?”

“What?” I'd startled her. She shot up like a splash and the sheet moved like a disturbed pond behind her. “What? Oh, nothing. Just go back to bed.”

“Ha! Yeah right. What've you got behind your back?”

“What? Nothing.”

I swung my legs out of bed and marched as authoritatively as I could over to her without making too much noise. This would have been a terrible time to wake The Parents.

“Julia, for god's sake, I know it's not nothing. Just show me what you've got. You know you can't do this. It's not fair.”

“Oh my god Easter, fine. You're such a brat.”

With that she slammed the big box of matches down into my hand with a thunderous rattle.

“What are you doing with these?”

“Nothing.”

“You're full of ‘nothings' tonight.”

“Well, I don't know, Easter. I just wanted to play with them a little bit.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“What's fun about playing with matches during the day?”

“I guess that's true.”

I sat down on the floor gently and spread my nightgown over my crossed legs, letting my knees provide the support beams for a little hammock. I then dumped a healthy number of matches on top. Julia sat down across from me and made her own nightgown match-dish. Hers was bigger than mine so she poured in even more matches. We smiled at each other. Julia always had the best ideas. I wasn't mad at her anymore about the squirrel.

“I'm not mad at you anymore, Julia.”

“I'm not mad at you either.”

“I love you and I want to keep you forever.”

She smiled and lit the first match and it came to life aggressively. Strong and high and bright but out too soon. Only the shortest bit of limp, withered head drooped from the end of the stick.

“Damn,” Julia whispered. She tossed it.

She tried another and produced the same overly enthusiastic result. Again the dud was tossed. Again and again. Soon there were dozens of singed sticks piling up around us like a campfire.

“Mom and Dad are going to smell this, you know. They're going to think we're setting the cabin on fire.”

She lit another match and we both watched with held breath as it slowly quivered to life. A little creature finally awakened. Our new pet. Delicate. Proverbially pink and unspoiled as a baby. But not for long. Its dark center lub-dubbed with heat. It throbbed in our ears. And somewhere in its deepest, hottest core, a picture came to life: a pair of legs over a jeaned lap, sunlight streaming in and emblazoning the downy hair misted all over the young, lazy legs that were now squirming somewhat. Toes thuddling. Slowly a hand, fingernails the size of quarters, came down on her tennis-ball knees and the match went out.

“Did you see that?” I asked.

“Of course I saw it. I did it.”

She lit another match.

The flame came to a jagged end and danced like a chorus line of bright little toes. They were lapped at over and over again by the heat coming up from the center of the match. But in a second that center became a long pink tongue, devouring the tiny toes one by one from the end of a pudgy foot. Wrapping around and sucking down like plucked grapes. But the foot didn't bleed. It just kept producing little toes to be inhaled. A broad smile, a mouthful of toes. Toe teeth. Then the match went out.

“Let me do one.”

So she handed me the box of matches. Her teeth glistened in the dark room.

I lit the match. And wondered what would happen if I were to kill Julia myself. Hold this match under the hem of her dress, watch it erupt, watch her spin around like a firecracker, skin melting, flesh dropping, charred flops splattering on the floor.

The Fire erupted in red, a dark sore in the center, moving out into a frenzied shell of orange. It was being prodded, poked, by some undetectable but furious wind. Rubbed and irritated, stoked. Then it hollowed out through the middle and became our tub, filled with water, glowing red and almost perfectly still. Floating in the middle of the water was a small gray squirrel, drowned and bloated, eyes as still as little black bugs. The squirrel became the head of the match which began unfolding from the inside out, getting bigger and bigger and I realized that I was holding a handful of matches, blazing.

The flame got bigger and hotter and then I was in an entirely different room. A white room with neon green lines like hills and valleys waltzing over the walls. Blue and red polka-dots puncturing the scene. I smelled clean laundry and rubbing alcohol and I felt hands all over my body, lifting things, poking things, pressing things, moving things, holding things, turning things, bending things, flicking things. Some of these hands even had special devices; pulling things, tapping things, probing things, stinging things. I felt like I was getting a makeover. I was going to get up from this bed that I was lying on, walk to the mirror and see a whole new face staring back at me.

I realized later that I was in a hospital.

I remembered Julia saying, “Easter, no! No! NO!”

And she'd been on fire, flinging bright bits of her nightgown through the air as she spun, each bright bit a fiery bird flying frantically and colliding with everything. The sheet that divided our room from the camping gear, the sheet from which the matches peeked at us in the first place. It went up quickly, shards of it joining the flock and soaring to our bed and our pile of books. Everything prickled; my eyes burned. We must have baked like Salty the cat in his trash can tomb before it woke The Parents and they called the fire department.