was sitting behind the makeshift counter, untangling a mountain of costume jewelry. “It’s silk, I think,” she said, looking up over the tops of her glasses. She and my mother didn’t look related. She was Mum’s little sister, but while my mother was miniature, like a doll, Boo was like me. Tall. Big hands, long legs. Boo had even played basketball for the UVM girls’ team. Sometimes when the shop was quiet, she and I would shoot hoops outside the garage.
I tore open one bag, and a bunch of scuffed shoes fell out. They smelled like sweaty feet.
Becca stood in front of the full-length mirror, adjusting the scarf around her neck and head. The burgundy swirls clashed with her strawberry hair.
I reached for another bag. It was light. Inside were two pillows, lumpy and stained. “Ugh,” I said and tossed it in the trash can.
“Someone dropped off some dresses. Nice ones,” Boo said. “Why don’t you look through those instead?” She motioned toward a rolling rack at the far end of the garage.
Becca let the scarf fall from her hair and rushed to the rack.
I sat down next to Boo on an orange leather hassock. The stitching was coming undone, and the stuffing inside was gray.
“How’s school?” she asked.
“I hate it.”
She nodded and worked on the chains in her fingers.
“How’s your dad?” she asked.
I shrugged. For the first few weeks after Mum left, Daddy stayed at home, sitting on the front porch smoking cigarettes, staring into the trees. I think he saw the red of her ratty old bathrobe among them, too. But when it was clear she wasn’t coming back to us, he didn’t wait anymore. In the mornings, he’d get dressed as if he were going to work, and then he’d get in his truck and leave. Sometimes he didn’t come home until midnight, and I knew he was looking for her. I imagined him driving all over the state, to Burlington and Rutland and Montpelier, searching for her, as if she would just be walking along the edge of the interstate or sitting in a restaurant somewhere and he would be able to take her hand and lead her home. He wasn’t looking for a job, because he was too busy looking for her. I didn’t tell Boo that, though. I only shrugged.
Becca had something pink in her hands. “Can I try this one on?” she asked shyly.
“Of course, honey. Use the bathroom inside.”
Becca scurried into the house, and I watched Boo’s fingers. Three silver chains, knotted and intertwined. A heart pendant, someone’s class ring, a broken locket.
“Tell me about Gramma,” I said.
Boo rolled her eyes.
“Please?”
“Which story?” she asked, loosening one of the reluctant necklaces.
“The one about when she finally left Grampa and took the train to California.” In this story, which Boo and my mother told together, my grandmother wore a straight gray skirt and a hat with a peacock feather. She carried a plaid suitcase in one hand and a train case filled with makeup in the other. In this story, she smelled like Evening in Paris perfume. My mother once found one of the midnight-blue bottles, broken and buried in the mud near the Pond, and she held it in the palm of her hands like a wounded baby bird.
Boo set the jewelry down and looked at me sadly. “Your mum didn’t go to California,” she said softly.
My throat ached. I looked at her, but she wouldn’t look at me. Her fingers worked the tangled necklaces, her eyes straining in concentration.
My throat was thick, my hands shaking. “Tell me,” I said softly. “Please.” And I waited for her to tell me where my mother had gone. She knew.
But instead she only recited the imagined life she and my mother had made for their mother after she was gone. The pink hotel from the four or so postcards she sent. Chandeliers and white sand. The smell of salty air and smog and the sound of waves that crashed into their uneasy sleep. I clung to the green of palm fronds and the taste of Italian ice eaten with a flat wooden spoon.
“Boo, where is she? You have to tell me.”
Boo closed her eyes and offered me explanations, a thousand tangled necklaces I tried to separate in my mind. Your daddy. For a long time. She couldn’t breathe. But I already knew why. What I didn’t know was where. But just as I opened my mouth to demand that she tell, Becca opened the door and stood there in a hot-pink dress two sizes too big, waiting for compliments, and I felt sad and sorry that I’d even tried.
Later, after Boo had given us supper, Quinn pulled into the driveway and waited patiently for Becca to pick out the few things she wanted to keep before he took us back home. Sometimes Daddy was there, but that night he didn’t get home until after I’d let myself slip off the edge of the wooden pier into the cold dream water where an undertow threatened and birds screamed.
My body mimics that girl’s now. It has lost its softness, without the necessity of curves. There will be no babies, so there is no need for hips, and I am returning to the body I remember. In this way, nothing can hide underneath the skin’s surface anymore; I have made certain of that. What was buried is now laid bare, each new malignancy revealing itself as soon as it is born. I am prepubescent in this remembered body. And I wonder if this is how he saw me then. As possibility. As before and someday. He would be sad to see me now, though. He would be sad to know that I am dying.
I remember his fingers more than I remember his face. I suppose that’s because touching was always so much more important to me than anything a face could disclose. His fingers had a way of skipping over my skin like stones skipping across the lake. I remember lying facedown on his bed, the pills of a chenille spread beneath me, feeling like water.
The discovery of the first lump was accidental. I wasn’t looking, having given up searching a long time ago. I found it the way you stumble across a dollar bill on the sidewalk. You know you should stop to pick it up, but it also means pausing, breaking your momentum. It was like this the first time.
In my terra-cotta-colored room, I was naked and alone, my hair wet and tangled from a shower. I was swollen, aware of my breasts and hips and the softness of down. Under covers, I pretended exploration, but it was too familiar. All of this. There were no surprises in my body to be found anymore. Nothing startled me the way it used to. But there was comfort in the predictable rhythms of blood and heart and breath. It was like sleepwalking, this touching. Smoothness of skin, interruption of navel, the edge where skin seemed to stop and then start again, warmth and wetness. My seamstress fingers always working, pushing and pulling at the fabric of my body, the needle moving up and down, precise tension and speed. But when I reached for myself, held onto myself, pretending my fingers were not my own, they stumbled. Remarkably, it wasn’t fear the small knot evoked, but relief: My body could still surprise me. There were still secrets to be found. And I let my fingers linger there, the certainty of what it was no different from the certainty of a new gray hair, wiry and strong amid softness. But later, when the inevitable connections between the lump and the meaning of the lump engaged, I knew my mother had been wrong. Some things are best undiscovered.
It is for this reason that I made myself forget about what I’d found. I left it there. I dismissed it. But, like the ignored weeds in my rooftop garden, it grew. It grew and grew, until finally I couldn’t ignore it anymore. Because of my neglect, it made itself prominent. It demanded attention. It became angry.
Now, in this child’s body, nothing can hide anymore. But somehow, this remembered innocence (of bones and blood and breath) makes what is happening seem almost cruel.
Once, as we lay looking at the lake through his bedroom window, he told me that there was nothing more beautiful than dying. That violence and peace are companions, peace always preceding and following violence. I knew he was talking about his wife. About her skin and bones fractured by the windshield and dash. About the way the air was so quiet around them inside the car as she lay dying. About the absolute silence of glass after it’s broken.
Daddy