Adrienne Casalena

The Magpie Eater

I used to eat butter. Whole sticks of it in the summer, the cool choking thickness sliding down my throat. That was when we lived in the apartment with the teacup wallpaper, torn over the places where the plaster was cracked, where Howard had bashed his fist into the wall. Howard ran away when he was fifteen. Howard was not my brother. They told me he was my brother, but I didn’t believe them. If he was my brother, he wouldn’t have done things to me. He explained everything the night before he left. He was so nervous he had smoked three cigarettes already and was suddenly yanking open the drawers of the oak chest and flinging out vinyl jackets and Mickey Mouse tee shirts and looking for money. I sat on my bed and watched, and he talked and talked, slammed things open and closed and kept talking, talking fast without looking at me. He needed a bus ticket, a fucking ticket. Fucker stole his leather jacket. Stole it three times, three. Where the fuck was mom’s wallet. Where the fuck were his cigarettes, couldn’t a fucker get a --- here. Yeah. This is sure funny, isn’t it. I’m not coming back this time. You know it’s funny, this is really funny, it’s Christ-awful fucking funny. I chewed the ear of a dismembered bunny rabbit and thought of butter, waiting to gorge on the pale pearly cream that would make me clean inside.

My grandmother’s house was where we went next. She had a crucifix and a portrait of a drowsy-lidded St. Francis in the kitchen, little copper trinkets of St. Anthony, ceramic figurines of Mary and Joseph and shepherd boys and thumb-sized plastic cordials of holy water. She was impossibly gnarled and withered, finely creased and elfin, walked hunched over at ninety-degree angles, kept figs in her apron pockets and did not speak English. My bare thighs stuck to the linoleum as I worked my tongue over the saliva-stiffened limbs of Angel Bunny, the mangled remains of a cotton-stuffed mammalian with floppy tinfoil wings. She kept the butter behind the orange juice, the Peter Pan peanut butter and the salad dressing that had expired in 1997.

In July the wooden slats of the deck beamed with heat under my fish-wrinkled toes, and the air was saturated with hot dogs, cherry syrup and the caustic nasal reek of chlorine. Webs of sunlight glided across the bright blue of my neighbor’s pool; the three girls shrieked and splashed and bounced in Shamu inner-tubes and smacked each other with foam things. I rubbed grass stains out of my jeans and stared at them. My forehead stung with sunburn and there were hard, knotty mosquito bites on the insides of my knees. I ached for the cold slap of water to gulp down my body, the exhilarating surge upward, cool webs of sunlight lapping over skin. “You can’t come in,” the girl was saying, peeling off the rubber tangle of her goggles. She streamed wetness. Droplets clung to her eyelashes. “Fat people aren’t allowed in pools because they make the water slosh out,” she continued with analytical authority. They were all watching me now. “Fat,” the youngest one solemnly echoed. “Fat like a piggy?” she inquired, squinting quizzically up at her sister.

“Fat like a whale,” her sister corrected, then grinned and yelped suddenly with delight.

They were tawny and bronzed, blonde as ducklings, and until then it had not occurred to me that I was not one of them. They were pelvic bones and shoulder blades and ribcages; they would not develop breasts until they were twenty. I pinched the pasty soft thing that was my stomach. It was true. I gouged my fingers into it; the pale doughy flesh sucked them in. The grass had left a red texture on my calves, my elbows.

I went through the sliding glass door to the basement, out of the scorching yard into the smell of sawdust, moth-eaten sofas, damp tile and cobwebbed pipes. It was dark. I was climbing over boxes, an ironing table, a sewing machine, a rusted tricycle, bottles of Clorox and apple juice fringed with white gauzy cobwebs, a busted television set. My leg banged into a nail in the wall and it grazed down, nicking over my ankle. A warm line of blood appeared. At last I found it, perched on a great hulking lawnmower. I dragged the plastic baby pool back out into the sunlight. It was pale blue and had cartoon mermaids on it and duct tape over a crack in the side. I turned and turned the handle of the garden hose; it farted rust and water reluctantly spurted. My sock was getting bloody. I squinted against the gleam of leaden-cold water.

They were watching me, of course; they were fascinated with me and there was nothing I could do about it. They were part of the stifling weight of the air, the suddenly unbearable glare of sunlight that was nailing down on me. They watching with a curious hunger my own unfamiliarity with the puckering of my arms and legs, the smooth pale swell of my stomach; they could smell the butter in me and wanted to rip me open and lap me up.

I would learn that their names were Katie and Kelly and Kitty, and that Katie was the one to be feared. She was burnished as a chestnut and lean and nimble as an orangutan, with a tight, shrewd, liberally freckled face that worked in ceaseless motion between grinning and leering. Kelly was taller and handsomer, her face had a Grecian symmetry; she bit her lips and licked the rim of her retainer and walked on the balls of her heels in a way that seemed to make her chin and collarbone poke forward. Kitty was the little one. Her cheeks were still round and her feathery hair curled around the soft nape of her neck.

Katie cartwheeled, raced and leapt into the little pool and sprang out shrieking. Something happened, some sort of agreement had taken place among them that excluded me, and the other two followed suit into a frenzy of racing and jumping and splashing. The plastic creaked and split. Their legs were streaked with bits of wet grass that was getting into the water. The hose was gushing, they were shrieking and I tried to move between them to protest. Grass was torn up in handfuls.

By twilight I had a floating stew of grass and sod clumps and onion fern and dandelion spore. The sky was a vast, cool expanse of purple, streaked with flames of blood-mottled peach where the sun sank into the grass. I stuck one foot in. The earth-strewn surface sloshed and closed over it. I put the other foot in and stood there in my own little swamp. I imagined that my legs had been amputated mid-shin. I was standing in a swamp where little grinning mermaids cut off your feet and pulled you down, beneath the matted surface into brilliant aquamarine depths. I closed my eyes while the shadows lengthened in the yard and floated into a piercing light.

My grandmother cherished them. When the bus dropped them off from camp she let them come tramping into the kitchen, dried mud flaking off their tennis shoes, their hair in ponytails under their baseball caps, newly threaded friendship bracelets on their wrists and ankles, their backpacks smelling like pottery clay and suntan lotion and towels twisted damply with chlorine and pond-weed. They would crowd around the table and dig their hands into a bowl of fresh-baked cookies, and she would croon to them in her undecipherable language and they would smirk and she would give them wicker baskets full of peaches from the trees my grandfather had planted in the backyard. I didn’t tell her that they stole the peaches anyway. I didn’t tell her how they sometimes held Kitty under water until big bubbles came plopping up to the surface that meant she was screaming, and how she would come out choking out throat-fulls of water and sobbing.

At first my mother lived with us. From the photos that were stacked away in dime store shoeboxes, I knew that she had once been pretty, pretty enough for a toothpaste commercial even. She braced herself carelessly against the click of the camera lens with her lofty auburn hair and darkly lidded eyeshadow, lipsticked and neatly poised in blue jeans and motorcycle tee shirts. But now her face was pulled with tiredness; the skin above her cheekbones was sunk in grainy shadow and lines sagged from the corners of her mouth and her teeth were yellow. She sat for hours in the spare bedroom getting cigarette burns on the carpet, never wearing shoes. Here toenails were yellow, too. Sometimes I sat on the floor next to her while she smoked, tracing the threaded knots of violet spider veins in her legs with my finger, examining her chipped nail polish. She stared at a huge oil painting of the Virgin Mary, never looking at me. I tried not to look at her, either, because I did not want to remember Howard, because sometimes it seemed like Howard’s face was waiting right underneath her own, the same overripe corn shuck hair, the narrow eyes tucked in above chalk-edged cheekbones. Howard was not my brother. Sometimes I read out loud to her, although the stillness of the room seemed to push against my voice as if I were speaking into a flannel mattress. Once I read her an entire pamphlet on Inflammatory Gastrointestinal Disorder; another time I attempted to narrate from memory an episode of Wheel of Fortune. “Would you like to buy a vowel?” I enthusiastically boomed at the Madonna painting.

The woman sitting next to me did not move. She didn’t look at me. I stared at a small blue vein pulsing in her ankle. Her legs always smelled like baby oil after she shaved. The carpet smelled like sweaty wool, singed and littered with stale ash. She didn’t do anything but breathe, and I thought about how unfair it was that she had to look so old, and the emptiness seized upwards and heaved against us like a tide.

In late August, I sat in the front yard playing solitaire under the old maple tree. A garden plot with tomato and zucchini and basil sprouted just outside the border of shade. In the morning when the grass gleamed with rain from the previous night, my grandmother would be kneeling over it, her face etched into a frown while gnarled fingers pruned at the soil. She plucked basil leaves and put them out on aluminum trays to dry in the fierce bake of sunlight. Then she would crumble them in her fist and scoop them into the little china teapots that she used as spice jars. I tried eating a handful of dried basil once. It tasted like parchment.

The playing cards were old and musty, yellowed and soft around the edges. They smelled like old people armpit. They were kept in a cigar box that had palm trees on the lid and a smiling fat man in a white suit with a curly mustache. They were left over from when my grandfather used to play cards with his friends. They would sit around the little mahogany coffee table and bet each other cigarettes, and sometimes money, and drink cheap Zinfandel and cheerfully curse each other. Also in the cigar box were prayer cards from funeral homes with his friends’ names on them, ensuring after all that they had turned into waxen corpses in mahogany coffins, wearing dead-people makeup and their Easter suits, with rosaries made out of topaz wound around the dead knobby fingers that had once gripped the cards.

The smell of freshly mowed grass hung in the air and I chewed my nails and put a Jack under a Queen. Next door, my neighbor’s van pulled into the driveway. Its doors slid open and Kitty was piping incessantly about something; Kelly unceremoniously whacked the back of her skull and she tumbled forward and began to whine when the concrete smacked into her tiny palms. Katie sprang across the lawn and pounced in front of me, landing like a frog with her palms down. She was wearing a crinkled blue jumper, the matching bow askew in her hair.

“What’re you doing?” she asked, in between snapping her bubble gum.

“Cards,” I replied to the little white pansies printed on her jumper.

“Look,” she instructed. A tennis shoe landed on top of my carefully stacked deck, and she was pointing to a grubby Band-Aid precariously stamped to her kneecap. “Fell off the monkey bars,” she said. “Scraped the skin right off, almost needed stitches. Want to see?”

I shook my head and reached for the cards. Intrigued with her wound, Katie was peeling the Band-Aid back to examine the fresh scab. She pecked at it once or twice with a fingernail, then tentatively touched the tip of her tongue to it. Satisfied, the insufficiently sticky Band-Aid was slapped back down.

I looked up and she was looking at me, and I noticed for the first time that her eyes were an odd shade of hazel green.

“Your mom’s a crackwhore,” she said.

I shrugged.

“My dad said so. A crackasswhore. It means she can go to jail. My dad can call the cops and they can put her in jail.”

“You’re making that up,” I said, stuffing the cards back in the cigar box. I was stuffing the cards away and I was seeing my mother, the soles of her feet grainy with cigarette ash, sitting against the bare plaster wall of the bedroom in the grainy light with old makeup caked into her wrinkles. She squatted in front of the oil painting, swiping the dust off of it with the palms of her hands. On the other side of the window, birds flitted through the front yard and sprinklers rained across the sidewalks. She turned away and flipped her lighter.

“You’re making that up. You’re lying and you’re making it up.”

Katie grinned and blew a big bubble.

Howard would beat them up, I told myself; if Howard were here, he could pound their faces to oatmeal. I could ask him to do it for me and he’d do it and they’d never bother me again. I sat alone in my room one afternoon and it startled me to hear my own voice, the way it sounded small and loud at the same time. I sat motionless and stared at the rumpled bed sheets and imagined to myself that I was talking to Howard. I practiced saying it. Listen, Howard. I don’t want you to really hurt them; you don’t really need to hurt them. Just make them go away. I just want to be left alone, Howard. Just make them go away and make it so they won’t bother me and I can be alone.

When Howard and my mother and I all lived together people used to talk about Howard. I’d pretend not to hear them, but I could hear them. One day he came home with his face all banged up, dark welts swelling under his eyes and his lips cracked and split like the old plastic upholstery on the backseats of our Volkswagen. They used a razor on his lips, he explained, and he showed me the little tattoo on the back of his left shoulder. And he explained that he needed Angel Bunny, and for chrissakes will you stop crying, it’s all right; see, after the little white packets were inside he could stitch it back up again and it would be all right.

But Howard was a liar and I knew he was lying because I would find him in the middle of the night curled up under the window, his fists balled up to his forehead, the veins in his neck jumping like rubber bands. He would weep without sound, just shaking and shaking, and I could see how small a boy he was; I could see that he was really very small. Outside, the world was filled with crickets and their millions of voices creaking into the darkness. He gripped the nape of his neck and pressed his face into his knees, and the carpet swam with shadows that moved across the moon. He was so small. His hair was starting to get long and he could almost put it in a ponytail. He still had acne that spread like a rash up from under his ear lobes. He wiped his nose on his wrist and leaned his head against the windowsill, and he thought I was asleep, and his face kept crumpling up, but he never made any noises at all.

It was November, and the trees were brittle and flaming. Grass was bleached to wheat and crunched under Velcro tennis shoes, and the sky was oppressively blank and its blank winds heaved and crackled. The peach tree stood like twiggy skeletons, knobbly trunks and branches stretched dry and stark out of a bare earth. The yard was scattered with a terrific waste of rotted peaches.

The school bus belched exhaust and let me off on the sidewalk in front of the house. Out of habit I wrenched open the mailbox and seized the waiting wad of envelopes. There was the usual junk mail, a church bulletin, and a postcard with a picture of a giant stained glass Jesus. He bore no resemblance to his crucified counterpart that kept watch over the microwave oven in the kitchen, of brass crudely molded into a torment of human sinew. This one was wearing elaborate robes of crimson and blue, jeweled with gold lace. He had long hair and eyes like my mother’s eyes when she smokes and stares away at nothing, and he was standing on a cloud held up by solemn cherubs with tinfoil wings. On the back, there was cursive writing in blue ink, the words not English. I trudged up to the house, let the screen bang back and yanked the door and found that it was locked. I grunted and shoved against it. Locked.

I went around to the back. I peered in the basement window. Dust sifted through a bar of light. Empty. Locked. I ambled across the backyard. Light slanted against the house. Bruised peaches rolled in the dry scratch of grass. I squinted at our neighbor’s house. The edges of their pool were lined with algae; the water gleamed icily and was spotted with dead leaves. I picked up a peach. It was mottled and sunken with rot. A dead bee clung to it.

It moved through the air without sound, and the little gulp of water when it hit the pool seemed like a gunshot. I found that it was extraordinarily satisfying: a soft, dead pulp of peach, bobbing and sinking into the pool. I grabbed another one, and suddenly another and another and flung them up and up, and the water plopped and shimmered. My mother was a crack ass whore. Crack ass whore. Crack ass whore. I perfected my technique. I exulted. The wind flapped the hood of my jacket against my face. My hands were sticky with the rotted juice; it dribbled down my sleeves. There was no butter anymore; only this: this putrid, overripe sickliness that mixed with the dead crunch of leaves and the dead weight of the sky.

The realization came too late, of course, and I stood suddenly arrested in its horror. I could say that birds had done it. I could say that it was magpies. I pushed back the lemonade-flavored panic that was rising in my gut and tried to reason. Magpies could do it. Magpies were those sorts of creatures, thieving tricksters, petty and unscrupulous. But I didn’t think there were any magpies around here. I could feel a knot of acid rising in the back of my mouth.

I stood on their deck and peered down at the glassy layers of water lapping against the slimy walls of concrete. The pool was dirtier than I had realized. Most of the peaches rested on the tiled bottom, covered with a film of tiny bubbles. I had to get them out, every one of them. In my school clothes. Now. I belly-flopped forward and pure coldness smacked into me. It soaked into my clothes and was immediately numbing. I yelped in pain and it invaded my lungs. I hadn’t even bothered to take my shoes and socks off. I hadn’t even bothered to take a deep breath. I dragged myself back up to the surface sputtering miserably. My hair was plastered to my scalp and my lips kept trembling faster and faster. The wind peeled back my skin like a knife.

The water tasted terrible, like old washtub water, and the insides of my eyelids throbbed with chlorine. The peaches were still down there, below my floating shoelaces. I tilted my head back against the pool wall. Far overhead, a flock of geese crawled across the sky. "Fuck," I whispered to myself, then coughed out more pool water.

I clenched my eyes shut and went back down. Gray water bulged and swallowed around me; I was surrounded by the looming walls, the wobbling lines of the floor tiles. Then a small garden rock was digging into my left cheekbone and dried grass was sticking up my nose. My upper lip ran with snot and my hair hung in wet strings across my face. My clothes were plastered to me and I could see millions of purple blood vessels in my hand, which lay like a block of granite in front of my face. There was a car engine somewhere, voices and someone breathing. The ground was lifted away from me.

I woke up on a green and brown plaid sofa, wearing a Rolling Stones tee shirt and a pair of underwear that did not belong to me. I was cocooned in two beach towels and a quilt. Nearby a television blared cartoons. The carpet was strewn with jigsaw puzzles, flip-flops, plastic pieces from board games, action figures, Disney movies, and empty fast-food cartons. A bare foot pressed into my ribs. Someone’s toes brushed my eyelashes and squashed down on my cheek. I looked up to see Katie, and realized that this must be her house.

She sat on the arm of the sofa and did not look at me, dug her feet under the cushions and meticulously fingered the tiny braids in her hair. She picked up a little toy doll off the floor and stared into its gigantic plastic eyes, eyes with purple irises and more lashes than a centipede’s legs. Abruptly she ripped the cord out of its back, and it let out a grotesque squeal. HELLO MY NAME IS PRETTY PATTY WILL YOU BE MY FRIEND FRIEND FRIEND? My gut shriveled with a wet squelch of guilt.

The next day her father tied a big plastic cover over the pool. “Dumbass kids,” he muttered.

I knew that my mother was not going to stay with us. For two months the old brown and orange Volkswagen sat in the front yard, rusting, the side molding cracking off, the windshield streaked with dirt, the front fender lodged into an untamed growth of honeysuckle bush. Then one morning she put on her dangly gold earrings, poured herself a glass of tequila and made a poached egg, reapplied her lipstick and swung her purse over her shoulder. She put on a pair of flip-flops, let the screen door bang behind her, and jammed the key in the ignition. It took her ten minutes to get the engine started. I watched through the curtain as she squealed into reverse, nearly plowed down the mailbox, and drove down to the stop sign and turned left and went on out of sight. She came back once; a man was with her that I didn’t know. My grandmother bolted the door shut and wouldn’t let them in. The next morning we found vodka bottles shattered among the tender basil stalks.

Then I woke up one morning and Howard was sleeping next to the trash can under the front stoop. Actually, my grandmother found him when she went out to shake the table cloth. She saw his legs sticking out and stabbed them with a broom. She jabbered frantically; he crawled out cussing with dried leaves sticking to his jacket and his hair. Once she recognized him she gripped his face in both hands and kissed him over and over. He laughed at first and then shoved her back.

When I came into the kitchen, he was leaning against the window devouring figs. His hands were ashy; there were black crescents under his nails. His face looked sunburned.

“Hi,” I said. He nodded at me and swallowed.

“I was living with some friends,” he started, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Marty and Jay. Bastards.” He smiled to himself. “Jay was such a little bastard.”

I started pouring myself a bowl of cereal.

“Hey, I had a hard time finding you guys,” he continued. “You know that landlady, that fat bitch, at our old apartment? Had to practically strangle her to get her to say where you got off to. Thought maybe Social Services abducted you or something. Hey now, I was only kidding.” He dipped his head down and lit himself a cigarette. He was pacing around the kitchen like he had lived here all his life. He opened a drawer and started looking through the silverware. “Mom around here?” he asked.

“Uh-uh,” I said, and something occurred to me. “Howard.”

“Yeah.”

I shoveled a spoonful of cereal in my mouth. “Have a question.”

“Yeah.”

“Mom can’t go to jail, right? I mean, because if she was a crackwhore, she might go to jail.”

I did not see the hand coming. I heard my jaw snap backwards and a sharp popping noise came from inside my nose. I fell backwards into the cabinets under the sink and warm wetness streamed out of my face. Don’t you call her that, Howard was saying. Screaming. A chair fell over, then the table crashed. You little bitch, don’t you ever say that again. The linoleum was littered with two cracked coffee mugs, newspaper, and soggy Cheerios. My fingers were getting slippery with blood.

Later I would be using the Fresh Lemon Scented Mr. Clean to scrub the dark splotches out of the carpet. Now I was perched on the toilet tank with the wall throbbing against my skull. There were forty-seven ceiling tiles. I stared at them while I listened to Howard rummage through the drawers in the bedrooms. He talked out loud sometimes but I couldn’t figure out who he was talking to. Howard sure was crazy. Crazy like my grandmother was crazy, crazy like my mother was crazy. Aprons with figs in them. The room with cigarette holes. I closed my eyes and tried to think of my mother smiling her toothpaste commercial smile at the camera, but all I could see was the stupid Jesus postcard.

I’m fucking sorry Jesus I’m sorry I’m fucking sorry. He was whispering it over and over and dabbing at my face with cotton balls soaked in ethyl alcohol. My head was suddenly burning and my temples beat against the cold porcelain of the toilet base. I could see past the bathroom door and the hallway was dark.

I woke up again later and I was still lying on the floor and Howard was sort of curled up by my knees, asleep. I couldn’t breathe through my nose and I pulled out a wad of toilet paper stiffened with dried blood. I sat up and my head started pounding and I sat still and waited for it to stop. Howard was still sleeping; he had started to drool on the little toilet rug.

I reached over and patted his hair; it was soft, like collie fur. His tee shirt smelled like old sweat. The bathroom was very, very quiet; I could practically hear the low hum of the sixty-watt light bulb above the wooden slats of the medicine cabinet. The dry rankness of blood rasped in my nose. The drain in the bathtub was rimmed with orange; the baseboards were edged in mold. Howard was fast asleep in his old tee shirt and rumpled blue jeans, still holding a fist-full of toilet paper. I patted his hair over and over. His scalp was oily and his ears were soiled; he smelled like cigarettes and ethyl and sticky figs in dirty fingernails. The silence of the house was pounding into me.

I closed my eyes and dreamed of magpies. Zillions of them. They hurtled through the backyard and the thrash of their wings and their cackling voices were deafening. Howard was standing there with a crazy grin split across his face, the wind whipping against him, and he was reaching out his arms and catching the magpies. He gripped them in his fist and squeezed until their bones snapped. “Eat them!” he was yelling gleefully. “They taste like butter.” He shoved one in my mouth and I swallowed it whole. But once inside me it was lifeless no more. It was a wounded thing of claws and a beating fury of wings, trying to tear its way out of my stomach. I howled in dismay as it tore itself up inside of me, and my fat fleshy body – my arms and legs and everything – began to turn into a soft pulp of rotted peach.

The bus smelled like fossilized ages of pencil shavings and greasy wads of old Wintergreen gum. From my seat, I could see the whole neighborhood as we rumbled past. I was wearing corduroy overalls the color of Pepto-Bismol, and my backpack was on my lap and I gripped it with both arms. Behind me, a persistent foot was kicking the back of the seat. With every thud, my head bounced forward and then back. My view out the window bounced forward and then back. Mailboxes and telephone wires and front yards and garages and the lady in a bathrobe who had a poodle named Lucy. Two kids trying to do the hula hoop. The power generator that had FU CKB RAND ON elaborately spray painted upon it. All glimpsed for an instant and rushed past and then gone.

The bus was filled with voices talking, and they were children’s voices, but I knew they were all talking about me. I closed my eyes and the foot kept kicking, but inside I grinned and felt very quiet and clever. People did not matter anymore, not even the Katies and Kellies and Kitties. I knew that the bird I had swallowed in my dream was still inside of me; there was a tight hollow space far inside of me where he had made his nest, and sometimes his talons would grip my rib cage, and his beak would snip at my heart valves, and there was nothing to do but wait for him to stop. I watched the world peel past my window on the bus, and all the while I imagined that I caught glimpses of the placid faces of Jesuses and saints and the fat man on the cigar box and old photographs of my mother.

I remember when they took Howard. It was a brilliant day in late autumn; in the morning, the grass had been delicately crystallized with frost and the supermarkets already had their Christmas decorations up. A sharp, golden light slanted across the dry yard. I sat on a wooden chair in the kitchen facing a window, knees drawn up to my chin. The sirens were reeling and reeling and they were right in front of the house, yet strangely, it seemed that the sound was barely coming through over a great distance. The space inside the house was filtered with silence. Howard was yelling; they were holding him, and he was twisting and jerking like crazy, and they practically had to drag him across the yard. I stared at him. It was taking forever.

The screen door banged. My grandmother was wailing into the telephone to someone, fumbling through the kitchen and ritualistically interrupting herself to gibber a prayer in Latin. I did not move. Something was starting inside of me; something in my chest jolted. My eyes burned. The feeling was drained out of my arms and legs until they were numb, until they didn’t even seem to belong to me anymore. My body was someone else’s; it did not belong to me and I was suffocating inside someone else’s body. Something was pounding; it was thudding through my. Harder and harder. Harder. The world had become an immense paralysis, soundless and tasteless, a dizzying crawl. I was holding my breath. The pounding was sucking me in. I blinked, and the wetness on my eyelashes glistened with light.

I was suddenly not sitting on the chair anymore but had leaped up against the glass, straining to force the window open. My fingers were shaking so fiercely I could hardly unlock it. Suddenly I was sobbing and gulping and shrieking, and the window heaved open and I tumbled headfirst into the old tomato garden. Dirt tumbled upward and leaves smacked my face. I rolled over and ran, and buried my face in Howard’s tee shirt and we were both knocked over. People were shouting and the sirens were suddenly blasting. My fingernails clenched into his spine; his chin banged into my forehead and then his ribcage smashed against my cheek. He was trying to say something, but it came out garbled, and all those damn sirens and nobody would shut up and leave him alone, so I brushed his hair out of his face and someone helped him to his feet. I realized that my grandmother was holding me. Howard stumbled forward and looked over his shoulder once. A bird twittered somewhere.

They took him to a hospital where I was not allowed to visit. It would be eight years before I would see him again, when he had grown a beard that made him look much older than twenty-four and his medicine seemed to make him lose focus on things and he did not talk anymore about Marty or Jay or his leather jacket. For two weeks, they did not let me go back to school. This woman doctor came and wanted to talk to me. She kept calling him my brother and asking did I understand what had happened, what had been happening all along, and I stared at my shoes and wished to hell she would shut up. I woke up in the middle of the night and wandered through the dark rooms, alone with the solemn benediction of ceramic and plaster saints. I sat in the cold plastic glow of the refrigerator and crammed in a mouthful of butter and forced myself to swallow. It went down with a chill metallic feeling. My throat locked; I was too late for the toilet and I vomited hot, thick acid. It dribbled down my chin and clung to my hair.

I went out into the backyard in my pajamas. The grass crusted frost into my bare feet, the moon was bright and the air snapped with the fresh twiggy smell of new winter and fat Halloween pumpkins that had been smashed in the alleys two weeks ago. I chose the biggest peach tree, in the middle of the yard crouched like a bearded gnome with three-pronged branches splaying out of its trunk. Sitting in it, sucking the sore bubble of a blister that had developed below my index finger, I stared at my neighbor’s pool, which was quite dark and empty and not half so glorious as it had seemed in the sweaty blaze of July. Summer would come again, of course, and the old oasis would be resurrected. I remembered lying on the sofa at Katie’s house, listening behind the wall as her father bellowed, and later I peeked over the frayed edges of the towel, and she was sullenly curled up into a tight ball on the loveseat, her long brawny monkey arms wrapped around her knees, her face shiny with sun tan lotion and a bright red welt swelling across her jaw.

That was the day when I had come home from school to find the house locked and empty. I learned later that while I was flinging rotted peaches, Howard had been kneeling on the sink in the bathroom, rummaging through the medicine cabinet, knocking bottles over and cupping little pink tablets into his hand. He vomited all over the place and they had to call an ambulance.

My skin prickled against the numbing air. I climbed down, hopped awkwardly onto the ground, and went back inside. Cautiously I pushed open the door to the guest bedroom. Empty, of course. Peppered and pockmarked with cigarette holes. Blue shadows stretched across the carpet. A little lumpish thing – Angel Bunny – was lying underneath the bed, which had been stripped of its mattress.

The crickets were gone. The peaches, too, their overripe richness sunken beneath the yard at last. And the last of the butter hand been spat out of me. In the end, all you have are useless things like photographs and playing cards packed away in your shoe and cigar boxes. Then I noticed something sticking out of the frame of the oil painting. It was the postcard, dog-eared around the edges, and beneath its foreign script something else was written, my mother’s handwriting, also in the same language. I knelt on the carpet and turned it over and over in my chubby hands, scrutinizing, trying to penetrate the unintelligible scrawl; struggling, against the cold and motionless and impenetrable night, to make it mean something.