New West Fiction

The New Sister

By Lynn Stegner, Guest Writer, 5-06-11

It was almost noon as the children walked up Orchard Lane, the shadows cowering into small gray blots that seeped out from under the backs of their tennies, like sweat stains.  They passed Mrs. Myer’s house, the third grade teacher who cooked the strangest sorts of foods, including artichokes, huge and barbaric things, and if you swallowed any of the soft prickles at their base, why, you could die.  That was what she had told them and from such knowledge they had made a stupid song:  “Arty choked on his artichoke and couldn’t get up in the morning.” Then came the yellow house where Ronald and Donald lived, identical twins who went to a private academy up the peninsula during the week, not the new public school three blocks over with its tetherball courts and walls checkered in brightly colored construction paper.  The Decker twins were nice boys, clean and round-eyed as marionettes; their mother used something in their hair that transformed the tufts and cowlicks into a surface that resembled grooved plastic.  Ronald was just then returning home, having gone somewhere on his bike, and when he saw them, he coasted down his driveway to join up, making lazy loops in the street to slow his wheeling pace to their Saturday drifting and dawdling.

In front of the adjacent house stood Mr. Kesselman, hosing off the sidewalk.  Louisa squinted down at the nearly white cement, scoured under the noonday sun, and remembered not to step on the cracks, but really, it was too hot to be that good about anything.  And Louisa was a good girl, everyone agreed on that.  But not so many thought so after what happened that day.

“Off to the pool, kids?” Mr. Kesselman held the hose to the side, letting the water plash with heavy flaccid clarity into the lawn as they shuffled by.  The smell of grassy mud sagged down toward them, warm and vaguely sickening.

“Yeah,” one of them mechanically intoned.

They had not yet decided where they were all headed, or even if, wherever that was, they would go together, since it was only Jimmy and Dan who had planned to hook up, but then Louisa had begged to go along, and when they passed Julie’s, she had trotted down from her front porch where she was practicing posting on her imaginary horse, the black one with the star on his forehead, and if Julie went then Robert too, who had a crush on her and who lived across the street and could see any activity, and when they had passed the schoolyard and there was Todd Wolfe, bereft of his usual band of lesser bullies, he had ambled after them, sniffing for trouble.  No one ever said no to Todd, and even if they had wrestled up the courage to tell him to bug off, it was practically im-possible to get a word in edgewise.  He hardly ever shut up.  A short, thin, wedge-faced kid who seemed a man in a boy’s body, and with a muddled birthmark like chocolate splashed against his neck, nevertheless, Todd commanded respect as the worst of the neighborhood torments, an avowed thief and an apprentice pyromaniac.  It was not that uncommon to see the fire chief’s car with its official Santa Clara County crest decaled onto the driver’s side door, parked in front of the Wolfes’ house and Mrs. Wolfe following the chief down the walk, her hands wringing promises that her son would not keep.

Maybe they would go to the Club, maybe not; there were always a lot of adults on the weekends; a lot of other-parents’ eyes noting who snuck out of the kid’s pool over into the big pool, maybe even into the dangerous and, for the youngest children, forbidden deep end.  Things happened in the deep end, aching ears and secret touches; once Louisa had seen a human turd floating by the ladder.  Even though it wasn’t hers she had felt somehow responsible for having seen it, and so she hadn’t told anyone.

As for Mr. Kesselman, it was usually best to simply agree with him.  He was what Louisa’s father called a “free-thinker”; Mr. Parker’s admiration of people who were “free-thinkers” conferred upon him a certain high-minded insubordination of which he was manifestly proud.  Louisa and Dan assumed that their father had been a “free-thinker” at one time but wasn’t anymore because now he had a family.  He had lived in France, briefly, during his college years, studying painting at one of the écoles—a word he pronounced with unsettling pleasure—and to that experience he returned again and again in conversation or reverie, in vacation dreams the Parkers could not afford, and Louisa had come to think of her daddy’s time in France as a pretty little raft that for a while had taken him away from the island of his life.  “The pursuit of joy,” he liked to tell her, “is a radical act.”

Mr. Kesselman was the manager of the local department store next door to the Ben Franklin and as a free-thinker he was always debating the “pros and cons” as he liked to put it, of everything and anything, from ladies’ pumps to Reagan for governor.

“Yes, sir, the pool,” Todd threw out, probably figuring it was better to support this collection of losers than to endure Mr. Kesselman’s studied double-mindedness.

As soon as the children had passed the boundary of his property, he thrust his thumb back over the hose end and aimed the now-hard white rush into the cracks of the sidewalk, washing the bits of gravel and dirt over the curb into the gutter.  “Stay out of trouble,” he called after them.  “And the deep end.”

Louisa had stopped listening.  There was a blinding dazed quality to the light and somehow the hose water made it worse, beyond relief, cleaning out one or two cracks but not cooling the unending black and white surfaces of street asphalt and sidewalk cement.  The squares of sidewalk marching one after another, the little lawns, so brightly plaintive, like hungry puppies; the flat bleak glare of midday, the sun not an object, not a thing up there, but a no-thing, a small searing hole in the top of the sky directly over the top of her head; the dry heat that carried—not entirely incongruously—the scent of Mrs. Parker’s seasoning cupboard, which itself brought to mind something just about to burst spontaneously into flames; and then Todd Wolfe skulking along at the back of their group, waiting to angle in and snag down one of them, maybe Jimmy this time for finking on Todd about the magnifying glass stolen from the science room…well, it was all making Louisa feel funny in a bad way; everything was fizzling out from her into a hot washed-out emptiness.  No matter how hard she tried to keep it back—whatever it was—things weren’t mattering the way they were supposed to.  Louisa Parker was not feeling like Louisa Parker that morning.  I’m me, I’m me, I’m me, she insisted furiously to herself.

“Hey,” Todd said, addressing himself to Dan, “where’s the new sister?”

“How should I know?” Dan shot back.  Louisa watched her brother quicken his pace, keeping his eyes fixed on the sidewalk.  The Cabaña Club was only a block away; they could already hear the weekend squeals of little kids in the baby pool and occasionally the lifeguard’s piercing whistle followed by the bullhorn telling someone to walk, don’t run around the big pool deck.

“So.  How’d that happen, Danny-boy?  A ready-made sister.  Let me pull a sister out of my hat.  Poof! No doubt about it, I gotta get a new hat.” It was a near-perfect imitation of Bullwinkle the Moose and in spite of the gravity of Todd’s feared though still unformed intentions and their possible dire consequences, some of the more oblivious kids smiled.

Jimmy leaned in to whisper something to Dan, caution or comfort, maybe both—Louisa couldn’t tell.  They never stopped scuffling along and the others in the group kept up, with Todd nipping at their heels like the janitor’s nasty terrier.  Louisa had lately been practicing a risky authenticity to which she felt she had earned the right to treat herself, just by having been a nice girl for so long.  First grade, second grade, third grade—nice, nice, nice.  She had done all the extra credit work, she had stayed to help out Mrs. Myers when they had made a mess of the classroom with a papier-mâché project, and she had refused to join some of the others teasing the retards who had their own classes, but who shared recess and lunch with the normal kids.  Before first grade she couldn’t remember whether or not she had been nice, it was all just a whirl of unformed memories, like the dust and debris that finally balls itself up into a real planet.  Nothing official, nothing that counted.

Now she turned, set her hands on her hips, and stopped Todd Wolfe.  He had a hurried, shambling way of moving that was never quite straight ahead, so that after she had swung about, she still needed to readjust herself in order to properly square off.  Todd actually waited while she found her final stance, his head cocked with a merciless amused curiosity.  Louisa said, “She’s our half sister,” exaggerating and slowing her mouth workings as if to assist the deaf, and at the same time to try to memorize the lesson herself.  Half sister, half sister…

The boy seemed momentarily flummoxed, probably by both her age—two years younger—and her blond, blue-eyed, doll-like and yet soldierly manifestation asserting itself in his way.

Finally he said, “Yeah?” and released a smirk; the way it started on one side and slid to the other reminded Louisa of a pet garter snake her brother used to keep in a shoe box under his bed.  “Half what?”

Then Dan was beside her, gently shoving her away.  Dan with his crazy mop of hair, his freckles, his nice and easy way.  “Half us,” he said.  “Half Parker.  What’d’ja think?” Normally, Dan would have added stupid, but after all, this was Todd Wolfe.

Maybe it was just too hot, maybe Todd didn’t think it was worth it, especially without his usual cohorts backing him up, but instead of tackling Dan Parker, he just gave out with a single chopping laugh and resumed the Saturday migration toward the Cabaña Club.

It had already been a whole month since their new “half” sister had arrived, right out of the blue.  One whole long lousy month, she told the sidewalk.

*

“You have a sister,” Mrs. Parker told them that Sunday night four weeks ago in the TV room.  When she entered, she had turned down the sound, but the children could still see Ed Sullivan, his head slunk in and bobbing as he clapped for the last act.  It was clear that by some private compact just executed, Mrs. Parker had been designated the spokesman, because Mr. Parker stood slightly behind her, his hands on her shoulders not lightly draped in that proud proprietary husbandly way, but nervously fidgeting, his eyes darting from the faces of his children to the olive-green shag carpet.  It looked as if he had been crying—the end of his nose was red.  The least bit of excitement showed up in the end of his nose.

Louisa stared at her mother’s flat stomach where a baby couldn’t possibly be living.  “Her name is Miriam, but apparently your father is calling her Mimi.”

At the word apparently Mr. Parker made a sound with his breath as if something had lodged in his “Sunday pipe”, the one you weren’t meant to employ for food.

From behind her back Mrs. Parker produced a small canvas, framed in gold, the vivid pastels smeared approximations of the girl’s features; there had been no attempt at realism; the artist had wanted to capture the subject’s character and spirit.  There were very dark brown eyes, almost black, with dabs of white that made them bright and hopeful-seeming, the cheeks were pink patches below high sharp dashes of bone shadow, and the mouth was ripe and hurt-looking, like bruised fruit.  Her hair was long and black and perfectly straight, and at first Louisa mistook it for a veil of some sort.  Their new sister was not smiling in the picture.  She was just looking out at them.

“What’s her last name?” Dan said.  And everyone was relieved, even Louisa, though she couldn’t have said why exactly.

“She has the same last name as we all do.  Parker.” Her mother was using the singsonging voice that she reserved for situations in which she wanted her children to do something without any fuss whatsoever, if there was no time, for example, to explain, or they were in public.  Being in public, Louisa had learned, was far more serious than any state of affairs, more than being in church and even more than being in trouble.  In fact, you could get into big trouble just by saying or doing something in public that you had been doing regularly at home for a long time and without anyone once protesting.

“Why?” It was Dan again—big brave Dan.

Mr. Parker reached and clasped his wife’s hand, and when he tried to say something, she gave his hand a quick resolute squeeze before releasing it, almost angrily.  “A long time ago, before we left Chicago and even before you were born, Louisa, Daddy, well…” She smiled weakly, grimly, then glanced at the TV as if there was help to be found there.  Ed Sullivan was flinging his arm out and stepping aside as the next act emerged from behind the curtain.  “…stubbed his toe,” Mrs. Parker announced, and in the weird bluing of the TV, her smile flashed like scrap tin in a vacant lot, sharp and dangerous just for being there half-hidden in the thriving weeds.  “We are going to love this girl.  All of us.  Daddy stubbed his toe, but we love her anyway.  She has our name now, and she is your sister, and that’s all there is to it.”

Of course Louisa knew this was not all there was to it.  Gamely she prepared for their sister’s arrival, taking certain covert measures as well, including emptying the spare change from all the coat pockets in the hall closet.  This had been a steady source of income, funding not only candy bars and Fanta sodas from the Club machine, but also the eighteen-cents McDonald’s hamburgers that the school offered every Wednesday.  She also thought it smart to hide particular personal treasures—a new box of BBs, a golf ball that had been painstakingly skinned down to the tight fist of rubber band at its core, the nicest of the Barbie-doll clothes, not the torn or homemade ones; broken bits of costume jewelry from her grandmother, Nana Parker, who lived back in Chicago; a miniature troll Louisa had forgotten to pay for at the Ben Franklin.

Over the next few days they managed to discover several more details orbiting “the situation” as Mrs. Parker was referring to it.  Mimi’s age, for starters.  She was nine, a year older than Louisa and a year younger than Dan.  “You know what that means, Lou,” Dan had said under his breath.  Louisa wasn’t sure but didn’t want to expose a lack of worldly knowledge.

Second, Mr. Parker had just recently found out about Mimi, and only because suddenly the girl needed a responsible parent.

Also—and this was the best bit of information they had gleaned—Mimi was part Navajo Indian, Mr. Parker told them when Mrs. Parker was off doing errands.  In spite of “the situation,” Mr. Parker seemed pleased by this fact, the same way he was about having been a free-thinker.  He was wearing an expression like the one he wore whenever he drove his old Citroën around the neighborhood.  He had an everyday car, a Plymouth he took to work, but he kept an antique Citroën in the garage, which he enjoyed waxing and polishing and taking for a spin on Sunday mornings when no one was up yet and the light was still gray and the round, bugged-out eyes of the Citroën’s headlights shone hardly at all, a dim dying amber, like history fading or the end of a story.  Before Mimi arrived Louisa often went with him.  A thermos of coffee squeezed between the seats, they tooled around one corner and then another, often ending up near the entrance to Laurelwood where there was a big field with a falling down old house at its center.  It was not a haunted house, he assured her, just abandoned.  A family had lived there once long before the grid work of the neighborhood was laid out; a fruit-growing family.  Eleven kids, Mr. Parker told his daughter, every one of them with extra long arms for picking.  Then he might wink and gravely say, “Now and then they would misplace one of the children.  Under a chair, or behind a dresser, or accidentally left up in the top of a cherry tree, living on cherries, poor thing.  They found the youngest child in the cellar, nestled in with a nice family of coons.  Quite happy, the girl was.  Didn’t have so many siblings to share with.”

“I don’t blame her,” Louisa said, thinking that occasionally even Dan was annoying, or in the way, or getting a bigger half of something.

Sometimes Louisa would climb into the Citroën and pretend to drive it, fast, along a foggy sea cliff, the lights really quite pointless, yellow stains in an endlessly vaporous world, nothing seeable, and anyway, what did it matter?  She was having free thoughts, there in her daddy’s Citroën, and it seemed to her that being a free-thinker would offer both protection and good reason.  “I hope you have good reason,” her mother was always saying.  “I just hope for that much.” But Mrs. Parker really wanted more than good reason; she had Visions for Louisa—of learning to type or becoming a nurse, acquiring the sort of get-along skills that were valued when she herself was a girl.  Typists met executives, nurses married doctors.  Dan was exempted from her visions; boys had careers while girls either got married or knew how to get along.

*

Mimi had arrived on a Monday before the children got home from school.  Mr. Parker had taken several days off in order to make the drive to Arizona and bring her back, and when Dan and Louisa slammed through the front door, heading for the cookie jar, there was Mimi, already in their house.  She was standing before the sliding glass doors, her hands behind her, staring at the plane tree in the backyard where, Louisa observed, absolutely nothing was going on.  Her hair was so long in back that she could fiddle with its ends from behind, but she stopped long enough to accept Dan’s hand.  “I’m Dan,” he said.  “Wanna cookie?”

Most of the time Louisa appreciated the way her big brother could be a gentleman whenever it might prove useful, but at that moment she didn’t see any reason why he had to be that way, there was nothing in it for him, no adults around to impress.

Mimi shook her head once. You couldn’t say that she looked at all like Mr. Parker, but there was a quality around the edges of her, a shining sort of imprudent hopefulness, that brought him to mind, even at that earliest meeting when she stood there in silent contemplation of Louisa.  There was such a purity to the silence that Louisa wanted to yell, or break something.  Instead, she said, “Come on, I’ll show you my room.” We are all going to love this girl, her mother had unanimously vowed.

Mr. and Mrs. Parker were already in there, re-arranging things to accommodate the addition of Mimi.  “It’s just lucky we thought to get a double bed for this room.  Isn’t it lucky, Louisa, that you have a double bed… now that you have a new sister?” Louisa noticed that her mother did not refer to Mimi as a new daughter.

“I guess,” Louisa replied even though her mother didn’t seem to be talking to her really; she was just mindlessly peppering the air with words.

Mimi went over and stood along the edge of the bed, looking first at the two pillows, then immediately at the small window on the far side of the bed.  She pointed to the pillow beneath it and then Mr. Parker said, “I guess you’re used to a lot of the great out-of-doors, aren’t you, Mimi?  I’m sure Louisa will be happy to give you that side of the bed.”

“Sure,” Louisa agreed amiably.  That was the side where, if there were bad things, they hid, between the bed and the wall, and under the window through which they came and went.

“Well,” Mrs. Parker began, “well, now that’s settled, we’ll let you two get acquainted.” She gathered up several empty shopping bags—Mimi’s things had come in paper bags and at first Louisa wondered if they were all new from the store—then Mrs. Parker fled.  They could hear her out in the hallway, “Isn’t it lucky, it’s just amazingly lucky, isn’t it, Thomas?”

“What?” he asked.  And for the first time Louisa heard a strange festering sort of irritation, the way Dan sounded when he had no choice, when he was positively stuck doing his chores, usually watering the backyard plants, and his mother called out to him from the house, cheerful and triumphant, Don’t forget the azaleas or you’re doing a wonderful job, dear!  “What?” Mr. Parker repeated.  “What could possibly be lucky?”

Mrs. Parker lowered her voice.  “The double bed.”

“For Christ’s sake, Mary.  Her mother’s just died.”

A burbling sob ruptured the surface of their civility.  “Oh, Thomas, how could you?”

*

Laurelwood was one of the hundreds of new, planned neighborhoods in the Bay Area, most of them with an elementary school and a recreation club of some sort.  The development had the standard-issue pseudo grand entrance flanked by two cinder block walls painted white and about thirty feet in length, one side bearing the name of the tract in scripted metal letters, Bella Vista or Hillhaven or The Oaks, something fancy and picturesque-sounding.  Situated between the entrance and exit lanes there might be a turquoise fountain pool or a ring of flowers, the kind they plant along freeways because it takes a lot to kill them off, or sometimes even topiary, hasty and when you got right down to it, basically just a hedge of something green and equally indestructible.  All the houses looked pretty much the same, except that the garages might be reversed one house to the next, or there might be a curving driveway instead of a short tongue of cement that lapped straight down to the street.  There was always a postage stamp front lawn, a low flat border of juniper maybe, and against the house, standing bottle brush or bulging oleander, sometimes red or white ornamental rock to set things off in the garden, and stepping stones of exposed aggregate that circled round to a side gate that let into the backyard. Outside, shake shingles curling in the California sun, stucco, board-and-bat redwood fencing; inside, three bedrooms, two baths, shag carpet and skip texture.  Everyone knew where the powder room was in everyone else’s house, and if there was a problem at a neighbor’s, where the water and power shut-offs were located.

It was terribly handy, the neat functional repetition.  Depending on where you had come from—what part of the country, where in the pecking order, how much money you had had before and how much now—the uniformity, the equality was either reassuring or insulting.  A local ordeal that effectively disclosed which reaction a new family might be having was the block party; this was a potluck affair held in the nearest cul-de-sac and featuring bags of barbecued potato chips, roasting dogs, macaroni or carrot-and-raisin salad, with Fudgesicles for dessert.  The Parkers had not missed any of them and were generally considered a nice addition to the neighborhood.

Mr. Parker worked for a business machine company.  When they were living in Chicago he used to have to travel a lot, but he was made “management” and put in charge of the latest expansion office in San Jose, California that still smelled of synthetic carpet and roof tar.  The family had moved into Laurelwood a year and a half earlier, weeks after arriving, and hadn’t quite got over the sunshine, the mild wet winters that promoted Louisa and Dan to weather authorities, since most of the other kids had never even seen snow.  Of course they had in their possession all the local mysteries:  how to build forts from the newly-cut mustard weed in the orchards; where the drainage pipe was that dropped four feet down, then fifty feet west and out into Howard’s Creek; when the Dempster Dumpster used for collecting old newspapers was at its fullest and best for burrowing through; why the dirt clod fights were ideal after a little rain but not a lot.

“You’ve been into the newspapers again,” Mrs. Parker said to her children two months after the move West.

“We have not.  Promise.” Dan could gaze into his mother’s nice clean blue eyes and lie angelically, the two of them plainly aware of their dueling counterfeit innocence and taking some kind of genetic pleasure in it.

“Yes, you have.  You are fibbing, young man,” she would say, raising her eyebrows and smiling with a satisfaction that was—to Louisa—baffling.

It was months before the mystery—of how she always knew—was solved:  their clothes were smeared with newspaper ink.  Louisa had felt strangely betrayed by her mother; it seemed cruel of her, to let them tell the same lie over and over again, and never once reveal her method of detection.  The other thing was that Dan’s share of the lie, though not exactly excused, was somehow accepted, like grass stains on his jeans, but Louisa’s role resulted in lengthy installments of “trust-building”.  These periods just about broke Louisa’s heart, she wanted so to be considered a good girl, a perfect girl.  And they seemed to have no end point; Mrs. Parker never once said, “I trust you now, Louisa.  I believe you.”

The young children of Laurelwood were never allowed past the main entrance.  This had lately developed into an awful problem because of the 7-Eleven that had gone in just across from the entrance, and which was selling something called a slurpee, a grainy slippery drink flavored with cola.  Some of the older kids were bringing them into the neighborhood, giving the littler kids tastes and daring them to cross Station Road.  Until recently, until Mimi arrived, Louisa would never have done that sort of thing, no matter how tempting it was; maybe her big brother Dan might, provided someone kept guard.  But there was something about the new sister, the sudden inescapable and still not plausible fact of her, that was pushing Louisa beyond her own familiar boundaries.  The whole thing did not seem real.

There was in fact a way you could get to the Ben Franklin and down Station Road to the 7-Eleven without actually crossing the road—by dropping into the drainage pipe near the edge of the orchard and then through it to Howard’s Creek, and then up its other side across the Walnut grove and onto the street of another neighborhood called appropriately Walnut Grove.  You could tell that the houses were older by the colors of the stucco, brighter and less tasteful than the pastels of Laurelwood, plus the bushes and trees were bigger, even while, overall, things just looked less tidy, less respectable.  In Laurelwood, if someone hadn’t mowed his lawn for a while, a neighbor might offer to mow it for him.  There was a divorcée (a word that practically jangled jewelry and gave off whiffs of perfume and cigarettes and other nighttime artifacts) living around the corner from the Parkers, a Mrs. Springer, who didn’t keep up with things, and so the fathers took turns trimming her hedges and mowing her front lawn, and Coach Brace, it was said, even spent a lot of time fixing up her back yard, which no one else cared much about since you couldn’t see it from the street.  One night soon after Mimi arrived Mr. Parker was told by Mrs. Parker that Mrs. Springer probably had enough help.  She gave a shrug of somber regret and then mentioned building trust, whereupon Mr. Parker turned and walked right out of the kitchen and into the garage.  Presently they heard the automatic garage door opener followed by the growling fits of the Citroën, and then passing the window Louisa saw the yellow lights crawling away through the night, dim and forlorn.

*

The apron of lawn around the entrance to the Club was a shiny tangle of bikes hastily cast onto their sides.  With a healthy fling, Ronald added his Sting-Ray.  Jimmy said, “Wow, it’s sure crowded.” Jimmy Snyder was slightly older than Dan, a responsible boy who had landed the local paper route and who usually kept an impressive and worrisome roll of bills in his pocket.  What if someone tried to steal it?  As both a target and a leader, Jimmy was someone to pay attention to.  When the children pushed through the tall swinging gate they saw the usual bunch of kids in the shallow end of the big pool but the rest of the pool was likewise dotted with bobbing heads.  A patchwork of towels covered the lawns and every single deck chair supported the baby-oiled body of Laurelwood’s finest.  Tucked around the corner next to the fence the little pool seethed.  There they spotted Mimi, a brown girl standing in turquoise water, playing solemnly with toddlers.  Because Mimi had lived on a Reservation where there weren’t any “bodies of water,” Mrs. Parker would not allow her in the big pool, not even the shallow end of it, which, even to Louisa, seemed overly cautious and maybe just plain mean.  Mimi was supposed to learn to swim first, only there hadn’t been any lessons scheduled.

The parents lounging on towels and chaise longues didn’t seem to know how to talk to Mimi Parker, so they simply kept an eye on the girl.  Mrs. Parker had felt insulted when they first introduced Mimi around the Club.  “They keep a weather eye,” she told Mr. Parker.  “Imagine!” In spite of Mimi’s silence, she seemed harmless enough.  Sturdy—not fat—there was an unnerving quietude to her broad handsome face, her eyes the color of molasses, her lips that never seemed to move even when she had made a decision to produce human speech.

The minute she saw them, Mimi climbed out of the pool and came over.  She was wearing one of Louisa’s old suits, noticeably too small, a fact that both embarrassed Louisa and prompted familial protectiveness.  Not for Mimi but for the real Parkers.  Julie said hi; so did Ronald.  They were both nice without having to think about it, which meant it didn’t really count.  Dan nodded even as Todd said, “Hey, it’s the new Sis,” loud enough for anyone on that side of the pool deck to hear.  Louisa had been digging in her pocket for a quarter and when Mimi had just about reached them, she spun off toward the Fanta machine where she studied the flavors with conspicuously fake interest.  She always bought grape.  Whenever she was in Mimi’s company she felt a strange urgency, like needing to pee, or noticing that there is something unidentifiable there in the shadows just behind what you’re doing that you’d rather be doing.  Plus, she was still feeling sore about missing out on the trip to Willow Lake with Jimmy’s family last Saturday.  She hadn’t felt like having to play with their new sister again, so she’d made the long trek through Walnut Grove and across to the Ben Franklin to buy a Nestlé’s Crunch Bar; but it hadn’t been quite enough to satisfy that new unnamable need in her, so she made her way down Station Road with the cars roaring past, scary and threatening emissaries from the world out there.  In the 7-Eleven she purchased her first slurpee.  It wasn’t as good as she thought it would be, and she ended up pouring the last of it in the gutter.  When she’d got home an hour or so later, the Willow Lake party had already left.

“We looked for you, dear,” her mother said.  “Everywhere.  Really sorry…oh, poor dear.”

Sick with grief, Louisa curled up on her bed, the tears instant, unstoppable, and so complete that it felt as though her entire body were twisting up tight, wringing out the anguish of her loss; as if there were nothing that could fit inside the world but her pain, it was so overwhelmingly enormous.  All she wanted was for the day to please end so that she might at least know that they weren’t still at the lake, her brother, her friends, Mimi, having fun without her at that very instant.  The simultaneity of her misery and their pleasure was maddening.

*

By some vaguely democratic process led by Jimmy who couldn’t find his trunks in the cubby assigned to him, the children exited the Club, having now added Mimi to their ranks who filed along behind Todd Wolfe.  She walked like a person trying to make things last as long as possible, steadily and evenly and with all of her deep-eyed attention.  There was no hurry in her, nothing she ever mentioned looking forward to in the future and no one she seemed to miss, not even her mother.  She liked to look out—out windows, doors, a seeker of horizons; anyone could tell that much.

“What’s it like on a reservation?” Todd asked over his shoulder.  They were shuffling along in the general direction of the entrance to Laurelwood, and now with the daily default of the Club behind them, there really was no destination, it was all just the meaninglessness of the heat and a dangerous itinerancy.

Mimi answered, “Quiet,” which for some reason did not make Todd laugh.  He just appeared thoughtful and preoccupied.

“You live in a teepee?” This was not provocative; he seemed genuinely curious.  That was the thing about Todd Wolfe—he was smart.  There was nothing to get him on, except maybe the birthmark and the fact that he didn’t have a dad, no one knew why, though it was rumored that Mr. Wolfe had ‘taken his own life’ and that ‘the kid’ had been the one to find him.

“Hogan.” Twice Mimi pronounced the word with momentous formality:  “Hogan.”

Todd bunched up his chin and nodded.  “Hogan,” he repeated correctly.

“We had a house too.”

“Yeah?”

“All the same, like these,” she said, making a sweeping gesture with her hand.  “But smaller.  The government builds them cheap.”

Todd started to ask another question but Louisa broke in.  “Quit bugging her,” she said, wildly overconfident and aware, too, that it was she the questions were bothering.

Again, Todd considered Louisa Parker with calculating amusement, letting her know—in so many unsaid words—that he was willing to put up with her bizarre and risky behavior so long as it struck his fancy, but that she was definitely beginning to push it.

Now they were angling across Orchard Lane and turning left onto Thrush.  To their right lay the empty field, the house sitting in soundless vacancy at its center, as if it had only just that morning been abandoned by its people.  The ground was a rag-tag of mustard weed, oxalis, and matted tufts of native grass, gray and tall as a man’s thigh, left over from last summer.  Every year someone came with a tractor and plowed the field to reduce the threat of fire, and every year some group of concerned neighbors with aspirations of a soccer or Little League field tried to buy it from the orchard family descendants, as the developers no doubt had tried not that many years ago when Laurelwood was built.  But the descendants wouldn’t sell, wouldn’t even tear down the old family house.  And there it was yet, a California ranch house, spreading out one way and another, sag-backed porches, two chimneys, a redwood tank splitting its sides up on a rickety platform, and not a living tree in sight, not one, they’d all been ripped out or left collapsed in a desperate snaggle of bare branches clawing up toward the sky, the old limb crutches hopelessly splayed.  Which was why Louisa didn’t want to go out there.  It was already so hot, so bright under the pressing weight of the noon hour sun, she felt she wasn’t seeing clearly.  That her eyes were like the yellowy balls of the Citroën whose light never went out anywhere, never penetrated the early fog or even merely the leaden veil of dawn that only the earth’s turning could lift or alter.

They made their way across the field, the eight children.  Because of the recent plowing the ground was uneven, the dirt clods dry and crunchy, some of them as big as a softball so that when they broke up under Louisa’s modest weight, sharp crusty bits cut into her ankles or scratched her calves.  It was not long before she noticed Dan rubbing his fists into his eyes; he was terribly allergic to mustard weed.  Maybe he would make them turn back; maybe what was already happening could be stopped.

Julie was trotting about and rearing, pretending to be Blackie, and Robert, always trying to please, cantered in close affectionate circles.  Every so often Todd picked up a dirt clod and lobbed it against one of the broken trees, most of his shots finding trunk wood and exploding satisfactorily.  He was trying to get Mimi to join him but she just kept plying her way across the uneven ground, like a herd animal of some sort, a water buffalo or a cow or the last elephant in one of those trunk-to-tail processions.  Finally he pressed a clod into her hand, as if to teach her, and obligingly, shockingly, she made a quick sideways flick of arm, wrist, hand, and found the same tree trunk.  Along with the dirt clod, something inside Louisa shattered.  “Hey, nice shot,” said Todd.

Once inside the children discovered that the center of the house, roof and all, had imploded; there was a bright sunny space carpeted with ceiling boards, scattered shingles, and precarious sections of old wallpapered walls see-sawing underfoot—it was like a fun house gone crazy, everything topsy-turvy and not funny, eerily serious in fact, as though something terrible had happened and the house itself was trying to cover it up.  Weeds grew wherever raw dirt had been exposed.  A toilet sat in what must have been a parlor and in the same room atop a miraculously intact brick mantle there was an armless doll whose black button eyes surveyed the scene.  In this place a family had once loved the doll.

To no one in particular Louisa shrugged and said, “It’s just been abandoned.” But it was generally understood, maybe even by the lately-arrived Mimi, that there really wasn’t any appreciable distinction between an abandoned house and a haunted house.

“My dad says…” Louisa began.

“Mine too,” Dan reminded her, not even glancing her direction as he scrambled about the small side rooms whose walls still stood, peering into closets and aimlessly flipping defunct light switches.

Louisa stared at him savagely.  “Fine.  Our dad says that there were eleven kids in the family that used to live here.”

“And we’re the kids!” Julie shouted.  “We’re the kids and our parents are gone, they left us and just never came back…”

Heat dazed and oddly frightened, Louisa murmured, “There’s not enough food…”

Dan, passing behind on his way into another of the little peripheral rooms, stopped and looked at her.  “What are you talking about?”
“The food is running out,” she told him, angry frustration in her voice, in the word out, as if it was all incredibly obvious, everything that had happened to her, to their family, and that was still happening, the catastrophe of things not mattering, and the heat…how could he not realize?

Robert climbed over a heap of rotten studs to get into the kitchen and began slamming the old cupboard doors and clanging a dented sauce pot against the enameled sink.  “The cupboard is bare!”

Between the kitchen and living room stood an old wood box on which Todd perched, one leg bent so that he was resting his chin on his knee cap as he fiddled with a small rusty device.  It had a cogged wheel and a handle, and might have been an egg beater or an apple corer.  “There’s only eight of us,” he observed matter-of-factly.

“Two are twins,” Ronald said.  “They ran away.  They joined a rock band that’s friends of the Beatles.  The Beatles love them.”

“Okay,” Todd said dryly, “still one unaccounted for.”

Unaccounted for…yeah, Todd Wolfe was smart, and for a while Louisa supposed that that was what had sent a flush of raw heat up her chest and face.  “She’s lost,” she informed no one in particular, staring down into the hole where the cellar used to be.  “They forgot her, everyone forgot her, there were just too many…” Her voice trailed off.  The dark opening at her feet and the hot sun overhead were creating a terrible tug-o-war inside her.  There was no place she wanted to end up, no comfort she could imagine or hope to find.  She was quite simply and completely miserable and the misery blew over her like a vast hot wind that came from no direction and went nowhere that was away and would never stop.

That was when the game commenced.

The abandoned children in the abandoned house have to fight for the remaining food.  Broken plaster bread, brick meat loaf; Julie gathers mustard weed and fox tail to toss a salad:  it is arranged prettily on a section of wall lying in the sun-blasted space, flowered wallpaper transformed into a table cloth, sticks of kindling for silverware, shingles for plates.  The children contest each other for the food, at first any way that comes to mind, but then someone—Robert?—mentions Mrs. Myers’ artichokes, Arty choked, couldn’t get up in the morning, and the terms of engagement become choking.  In fact, the only way you can win is by choking the food out of your opponent’s mouth.  Dan climbs atop Jimmy’s chest, trapping his victim’s arms beneath his knees; Jimmy pretends to cough up the fare he has just eaten.  For verisimilitude he hocks a lugie, then claims his turn choking the food from Dan’s mouth, Dan making a great show, rolling his eyes, lolling his tongue, which reduces both of them to hysterical laughter.  Julie and Robert are at each other, except that Robert spits out the cherished and imaginary food before Julie can properly choke him.  “You can’t just give it to me,” she complains.  “It wrecks it.” Ronald and Louisa take turns strangling each other, Louisa hanging onto the stem of Ronald’s thin white neck until he yields up the life-giving rations.

And then with her customary silence Mimi walks over and lies down beside them.  Ronald must feel funny about it, maybe because no one really knows the Parkers’ new sister.  Leaping up, he vanishes into some other part of the house.  In fact, everyone seems to vanish, faces and voices retreating at breakneck speed as if the camera is zooming out to a far-flung setting in which Louisa Parker’s life used to take place.  Then it is just the two of them, Louisa and her half sister, in the hot bright laid-open space where the orchard family home has fallen in on the heart of itself.

“You first,” Louisa says out of the habit of being nice.

And so Mimi sits on Louisa and squeezes her neck.  The pressure is intermittent and bearable but there is a part of a moment—just the smallest inside pocket of one—when it seems maybe scary, when Louisa might be detecting a twitch of wildness, of lost control, like something slipping naturally into what it used to be, or is used to being, the way Louisa is used to being nice.  It could be that she is hoping for that; it could be that Louisa has been longing for a peek at the malice she is sure this girl has brought with her into the very center of the Parker’s house and home.  Like an infection.  In her own mind Louisa is positive that she has seen it.

(She told Dr. Pearlstein that, but that was much later and by then the idea had gained strength.)

The sun is up there behind the black veil of Mimi’s hair, up there like a bad halo, and at the same time the edge of one of the boards beneath Louisa is digging hurtfully inside the crevice of her shoulder blade, and vaguely she is wondering where exactly the hole is that opens into the bottomless pit of the cellar, is it nearby?  Will she break through and fall forever into it?  And wondering too where Todd Wolfe is only because it is what you have to do with that kind of simmering human hazard, keep track of what state it is in, how near it is.  The air begins to prickle.  Then the bad halo and the human shape that is the void of Mimi in the noon light slide off to the side.  The hard white light takes over.  Her throat feels… exercised, not sore.

“Now I eat,” Mimi says without triumph, without expression, and she cups her hands over her mouth, dutifully acting her part.

So it becomes Louisa’s turn.

From the broad plain of her face, Mimi’s eyes gaze up at her as if she is an animal forced to monitor a distant bird of prey winging back and forth across the sun.  Her eyes are dug into her face like a couple of silent caves.  Louisa wishes the caves are not there, or that whatever is in them will stop peering out at her, watching.  Louisa looks at her own hands at the ends of her own two arms and remembers the extra long arms of the orchard family children, and the armless doll, and the girl who lived in the cellar with the coons; she thinks of the deep end of the pool where things happen; and Mr. Kesselman’s free thinking that never settles down anywhere, everything is always in doubt, nobody seems able to solve anything once and for all.  She wants—suddenly, desperately—to have good reason.  But what things come flocking to mind, like riotous black wings, wings without birds, birds without bodies, are Dan saying he’s my dad too and Todd Wolfe pressing a dirt clod into Mimi’s capable hand and how hot the sun is in the hole above her head and the way Mimi cupped the imaginary food and brought it gently and weightlessly to her lips.  Then Louisa watches her fingers wrap around her new half sister’s neck, the thumbs lining up in a way that makes it seem right.  And she simply squeezes as hard as she can.  She is aware of wanting to squeeze away everything that is between her fingers; of wanting to end up with air and her two hands meeting in a state of happy old reassurance, like twins who have been cruelly kept apart.  She might hold onto herself again and not feel a stranger huddled under the noonday glare.  It is easy, really quite easy, shocking, nothing, really, at all, and it takes almost no time to make Mimi cover the caves of her eyes and lock away what is hiding inside them.

*

“There was a sound,” Todd Wolfe told the fireman.  “Like a dog who’s got something whole down its throat.”

Almost everyone, except people like Mr. Kesselman, was surprised that it was Todd who yanked Louisa off the girl and he who ran the two blocks back to the Cabaña Club.  It happened that there was already a fire engine there, because one of the poolside adults had suffered minor sun stroke.  Of course the fireman knew Todd Wolfe, owing to the episodes of pyromania, and was disinclined to believe the boy until the arrival of a second youngster, one of the Decker twins, persuaded him that there was in fact a problem over in the old orchard house.

“Just throttled her,” one of the other parents said.

*

Mimi Parker was in the hospital for five days.  The Parkers were quiet during that time, not exactly tip-toeing around the house but moving about as if through some thick resisting medium and murmuring behind their bedroom door late into the night.  They were awfully polite with Louisa, less so with Dan; she might have been a guest who had come from another continent practically.  Africa maybe.  Dan went to school and still had his chores to do, but he wasn’t complaining, at least not during those days.  Louisa got to stay home and watch TV—a lot of it—Captain Kangaroo, Have Gun Will Travel, Lassie, The Rifleman, Flipper.  She felt peaceable now, played out and peaceable.  Then one morning Mr. Parker put his hand on her shoulder and walked her out to the Plymouth, and drove her to the airport.  She stayed with Nana Parker in Chicago for three months, until school started in the fall.  Chicago was where she went to Dr. Pearlstein.  They had talks.  When Louisa came home to Laurelwood she found that her daddy’s Citroën was gone and that the garage where it had lived had been made into a room for Mimi with tall windows that opened to the east through the foliage of the young plane tree in the backyard.  Now their house was the only one that didn’t look like all the others in Laurelwood.

***

“Remember the block parties?” Louisa asks her sister.

“No,” Miriam replies.

“That’s right,” she says, glancing off, “we stopped going to them after you came.”

The waitress appears and Louisa orders a diet Coke.  Miriam asks for a glass of Chardonnay and when it arrives she sees that her hand is shaking and reaches quickly for the steadying stem.  She is in town for only two days.  This lunch is her idea.  Like many of her visits over the years, the last one three months ago was bad—surreptitiously; only the two of them, the sisters, can say exactly where and when the tiny assaults occurred, so remarkably accurate, the standard defenses triggered, enacted, the snipes and blows, the unheard underground melée.  It was a birthday dinner party for Louisa’s husband, Conner.  Miriam and four couples, all dinks—dual income, no kids.  They have decided against children, Louisa and her husband.

Mr. and Mrs. Parker are long gone; Dan was killed in a boating incident, aged twenty-two.  That was fifteen years ago.  So they are it—the last repositories of those years, those people, those memories.

“We can’t be far from Laurelwood,” Miriam says.

“Couple miles.”

“Do you ever drive through it?”

Louisa lifts an eyebrow.  “In my business…” Her manner is casual, almost blasé.

“That’s right, of course.” Nodding, smiling, Miriam is hopeful that this might actually work.

“The club is gone.  And the trees—huge.  The whole neighborhood is shady now.”

“What about the orchards?”

Louisa sucks on her straw but stops long enough to say, “Condos.” Like her husband, she is a real estate agent, fit and petite, who handles mostly million-plus properties and who likes to attribute her success to attention to details.  Miriam has one of her magnetized business cards, the kind made for refrigerator fronts, with that phrase, attention to details, beneath her name.  But she does not think that this is the secret to Louisa’s success.  It is the kind of success that Miriam has not been able to care much about—financial success—though she has never let on because it gives Louisa something on her.  Tangible and widely agreed-upon, a recognizable American virtue.  Louisa has always seemed to need that.  Miriam teaches in one of the reservation schools and her husband is a blacksmith artist.  Already they have three children.  Real money is probably not in their future.

The sisters have never talked about what happened; maybe they couldn’t afford to, or maybe it’s because they are women.  Miriam believes that women often make bargains with themselves to not remember, or to rearrange memories and impressions in order to be able to stay comfortably related.  Certainly she has.  What if I ever need a kidney, she has said, half-joking, to her husband.

The waitress comes by for their order, and Miriam tells her that they are taking their time today, smiles apologetically, then sips at her wine only once to convey a leisurely pace.  The restaurant is filling briskly with young business types laddering their way up; there is an eager, toothsome quality to their conversations, as if they are feeding on that as well, on anything that wanders within range.  For some reason the restaurant has chosen an elephant theme, which Miriam has trouble fitting with food or dining pleasures.  Across the table, behind Louisa, there is a massive elephant head emerging from one of several merely decorative columns, its trunk uncoiling down behind her back.

“Lou,” she begins, “how can we make our relationship better?”

“Are we here to talk about that letter?  Is that why we’re here?” With each word her head nods encouragement and agreement.  “Because I might lose my appetite if that’s why we’re here.”

It’s a funny little threat.  Nevertheless, Miriam does think—momentarily—about Louisa’s appetite.  Losing it.

“Well not necessarily.  I just want to know how we can make our relationship better.  I want to try.”

“Don’t send letters like that.  If you want to improve our relationship, don’t send me letters like that.  Ever.” An instantaneous hardness invades her tone and actually takes Miriam by surprise.  She knows that, in recollection, she will be ashamed of herself for that surprise.

“I was being honest,” Miriam says quietly.  She is also surprised by how fast, how sharply, things have taken a bad turn.  The lunch is beginning to feel irretrievable.  They haven’t even ordered yet.

“It was bizarre.  Now all I need to do is show people that letter and they know how bizarre my sister is.” Louisa says this as if she has been patiently waiting to stumble upon some form of proof, supportive evidence of a long-standing hypothesis.  She has pushed her glass of Coke away from her and is pressing backwards against the booth, both hands rapping the tabletop, daring Miriam to utter a response.

“The view is different from my side of the street.  I showed the letter to Scott, to the kids, to a friend who’s a counselor.  Before I sent it.  They all thought it was a good letter, hard to write, but…necessary.  Because Louisa, if you don’t want to see me, if that would make things easier for you, it would be better if you just told me.”

“I was the hostess!” Louisa says, almost shouting.  But by now the restaurant is loud and the business types, so edgy and animated, are in the throes of their time-limited feeding, and no one has heard or if they have, the words are instantly disregarded spikes on the radar screen.

Miriam gazes openly at her sister, trying to recover her footing on the path.  She has always been okay with silence, with just looking.

After several minutes, in a voice as flat as pavement, Louisa says, “The inscrutable Redskin.”

“Oh Louisa…please.”

“The Parkers’… inscrutable…Redskin.”

There is a fist of grief augering its way up Miriam’s throat now.  “I’m speaking to you as my sister, not my hostess.  Yes, you invited me to your home, but you let me know in every other way, in the stiffness of your embrace, in the way you asked about Scott’s cancer, so offhandedly, now tell me about Scott’s cancer and pass the salt…in your little public sniping at me…so many ways…you let me know that I was not really welcome.”

“I invited you to our home.  I was the hostess!” This time two young men, both wearing white button-downs, glance over.  One of them scowls briefly, then lets out an appreciative snort, as if the two women are part of some luncheon entertainment provided by the establishment.

Though her heart is pounding sharply, Miriam is determined not to show how upsetting this is, not to cry, not to raise her voice.  “Yes, you invited me and that was the end of it.  You could check it off your list of details.  After that it just did not seem to me that you really wanted me there.  Why do you want me there?  Just to punish me?”

Louisa leans forward.  Something has happened at the center of her face, it has collapsed or cratered subtly in a vague sort of square that runs from her eyebrows down along the maceration hollows and then straight across her mouth.  Her eyes have always been on the small side, a perfectly nice hazel, but now Miriam notices that the whites have gone pink, almost as if someone has droppered a touch of red dye into them.  “I was the hostess.  You were in my home.  You were eating my food.” Her voice is graveled back and down, like a tractor in low gear pulling up something enormously heavy that has been long and deeply buried, and now Louisa is standing, heading away from Miriam, making a gesture with both hands along her sides, a final flicking-away motion.  No more or that’s it or I can’t stomach you one second longer.

Miriam is afraid to lift her eyes and see who has witnessed this violent domestic exodus, this final abandonment and dismissal.  Instead, she runs her fingers gently up and down the stem of the wine glass and sips occasionally, supposing that the wine might help.  The elephant head with its uncoiling trunk is peering blankly across the table.  The elephant in the room, she thinks without even a grim inward acknowledgement.  I am left with that.  It is a shame to waste the wine, to waste anything, there is sometimes so little to go around.  After it is gone and a respectable enough time has passed, she tells the waitress that they have had a change of plans and must go now.  She thinks about simply leaving a twenty on the table—far more than necessary—and just exiting, but decides against it, not wanting to expose even the slightest trace of desperation.  The bill paid, she leaves an appropriate tip.

Out in the rental car it is a while before Miriam can stop crying, and it takes the rest of the day and night, plus dinner with an old friend, for her to accept this end and the huge sadness filling in the blanks around her.  Not that long, considering what was at stake.

On the flight back to Arizona she realizes that it is a relief not to have to try any longer.  The plane, shuddering skyward with its fragile cargo, reminds her of the jocular remark she made to Scott, about some day needing a kidney.  No chance of that now, not from Louisa anyway.  The stranger strapped in beside her was a more likely donor, and after all, hadn’t this always been so?  Now she would have to take good care of her own two good kidneys.  She would have to take very good care of herself.

***

***

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