Forecast (7 page)

‘Where's Francesca gone?' Steven's voice is dream-fogged and forlorn. He rubs his eyes and looks warily down at his bare feet.

‘She left us. She's gone to North Carolina instead.'

‘Would we have stayed?' he wants to know. ‘If Francesca had come, would you have stayed?'

‘I would have been tempted,' Leah confesses. She begins sweeping the shards of glass into a pile. She stoops with the dustpan and brush. She looks up at him as glass clinks against plastic. ‘But then I would have thought about you. And I could never tolerate the thought of you in danger.'

‘So we would have vacuated.' He folds his arms and hugs himself, glum. His words have the weight of accusation.

‘We would have obeyed the evacuation order. It would have been the wisest thing to do, the best thing, don't you agree?'

‘I don't know,' he says. He pulls a chair across the room to the broken window, climbs on the chair, and leans out through the empty frame. He is straining after Francesca. He smells the rich damp perfume she leaves in her wake. ‘Is it the best thing?' he asks plaintively. ‘Is it?'

‘I don't know either,' Leah says.

She's black, I'm white, but we've been blood sisters since we were twelve years old. We did it with barbecue skewers – the thin kind used for threading shrimp, not the thick kebabs kind – jabbing our thumbs and rubbing them together and sucking our intermixed blood.

‘That didn't even hurt,' she said.

‘We're bionic women. That's why.'

She grinned. ‘Bionic women.' She liked that. ‘Nothing can hurt us.'

We had compared welts. She had X's on her back and buttocks, I had weather maps on my legs. That was why I always wore jeans no matter how hot it was. You could see storm fronts moving up my calves to the soft underside of my knees. You could trace isobars.

‘It's better when you do it to yourself,' she said carefully. She waited. She wanted to see if I understood. Then she said casually, as though
commenting on a preference for broccoli over green beans, ‘Razor blades are good.'

Our eyes met then and something electric and thrilling passed between us.

‘You can make whatever patterns you want,' I agreed, ‘and it's private.'

She frowned slightly, thinking about this. ‘You can't always keep it private, but it's still better. Because no one else is doing it to you.' We were hardly breathing, we weren't even blinking, just keeping watch, but I could hear my heart and hers, loud as kitchen timers, loud as the band teacher's metronome, far louder than our voices which were barely above a whisper. We didn't want the guards to hear. We didn't want anyone else in the visitors' room listening in.

‘We make secret weather,' I said. ‘It only rains
in
side.'

‘Even though it makes him madder.'

‘Your dad?'

‘Stepdad. My mom's boyfriend.' She studied me thoughtfully. ‘Does yours make you take off all your clothes when he punishes you?'

I did not say yes, but she heard me anyway.

‘I wonder why they do that,' she said.

‘I don't know.'

That was not true. I did know why, and of course she did too, but I didn't want to talk about
it any more than she did, not then, not now, not ever. This was why, when I made my own weather maps, I did them in hidden places like the inside of my thighs, high up, or the inside of my upper arms. Clothes on or off, I had what you could call cloud cover. ‘Where I do it myself, it doesn't matter,' I told her. ‘It's camouflaged. He doesn't notice.'

‘What about the blood?' The way her brows knit, I knew this was a problem for her.

‘I mop it up with washcloths and tissues then throw them out.'

‘Mine always sees,' she sighed. ‘Then he whips me again.'

‘Where do you do it?'

‘Belly.'

‘You should try this.' I lifted one arm high and pulled at the front of my T-shirt so she could see. ‘Eye of the hurricane,' I said, showing my armpit.

She winced. ‘That is real ugly weather.'

‘Category 5.'

‘That's got to hurt.'

‘You know it doesn't.'

‘But it's infected. There's pus.'

She had to know that that was how you drained off all the sewage and crap, but I said it again, annoyed with her. ‘You know damn well it doesn't hurt.'

‘Oh shit,' she said. ‘We are so fucked up. Are we fucked up or what?'

‘We're fucked,' I conceded. ‘Call 911. Code Red.'

She put an imaginary cell phone to her ear. ‘Emergency,' she said. ‘We got vampires here. Code Red.'

I don't know why but we both started to giggle then. It was funny how laughing always made the guards nervous. We put our crossed arms on the table and buried our faces in them and stuffed the fronts of our T-shirts into our mouths but it only got worse. First the table, then the floor, was shaking. One of the guards came over. He put his boot on my chair and touched the gun on his hip. ‘You girls getting hysterical?' he wanted to know. He patted the front of our shirts the way fathers and stepfathers do. ‘You smuggling something inside here?'

She stared him straight in the eye. ‘You negotiating?' Her cheeks and her forehead were flushed.

‘Jesus Christ,' he said. ‘Ain't that something? A twelve-year-old whore. Runs in the blood, huh?' He put his headphones back on and shambled to his desk by the door. He plugged us out.

‘Runs in the blood,' she whispered, and another gust of stifled giggling descended on us, then lifted and passed. On a blank page in our colouring books, in black felt marker, she drew a man in a
chair beside a door and X'd him out with a thick black cross. On another page, she wrote:
My name is Tiyah. What's yours?

I wrote
Elizabeth.
Then I whispered, ‘Why are we writing?'

‘Elizabeth,' she said very loudly, ‘why are you whispering?'

We both looked at the guard. He was tapping his foot to the music we couldn't hear. He was oblivious to us. We spluttered with laughter again.

‘I've done it on the bottom of my feet,' she confided.

‘That's a good place. He wouldn't see that. No one would see that.'

‘I do flowers. Daisies. Roses. Gardenias.'

‘But doesn't that make you limp?'

‘Nah. I'm bionic, right? You want to see?'

We told the guard we needed to go to the bathroom. He pulled his earplugs out and nodded then put them back in. He was used to girls going together. He gave us this prison-guard kind of smile, his tongue hanging out, drool on the side of his lips. ‘You show me yours,' he said, ‘and I'll show you mine, right, girlies?'

‘Get fucked,' she whispered under her breath, after he'd plugged back in.

In the bathroom, she flashed the petals on the balls of her feet. It was beautiful work, like a
rainforest bursting out of her sneakers. I showed her the inside of my thighs.

‘I do my name too,' she said. ‘My
real
name. Not the one they gave me.' She showed me. I ran the tip of my index finger over the scars on her belly. I couldn't read them.

‘What's your real name?'

‘Tiyah.'

‘Then what's the name they gave you?'

‘Same,' she said. ‘At least they think it's the same, except I pronounce it and spell it a secret way. But nobody knows what my last name is. No one but me. And now you.'

She wrote her name on a piece of paper and gave it to me. I put it in the pocket of my jeans. I stroked her belly. ‘This is the secret way you write your name?'

‘Yes.'

‘But your dad sees this.'

‘Stepdad. He can't read it though. It scares him. He doesn't know if he did it or not. It drives him crazy.'

‘Well, they can't touch us now. Not while they're inside.'

‘Right,' she said. ‘We can heal.'

I winced. ‘Yes, we can. Why do you say it like that?'

‘Because. I know what's coming when he gets out. And I still cut myself on visiting days.'

‘Me too,' I admitted. In fact, I used to start cutting two days before visiting day. On the day itself, I vomited and had diarrhoea before visiting hours and then again after. Both.

Her stepdad bred pit bulls, mine set fires. We used to meet on Sundays in the visiting room where they gave you colouring books and magic markers. When your mother's name got called you didn't look up, you just pushed down hard on the markers. Tiyah and I never stayed inside the lines. That was the first thing I noticed about her, weeks before we spoke and before I knew her name. She was the only other kid who didn't stay inside the lines. The colouring books had blank pages too and you could draw pictures. In the beginning, we didn't talk, we just showed each other what we'd drawn. My artwork was full of orange and red, with thick black funnels of smoke. She drew dogs with teeth like knives. We didn't explain anything, we didn't speak at all in those early days, so I just thought she was scared of dogs.

She wasn't, as it turned out.

She loved pit bulls, she never blamed the dogs, she blamed her stepdad for the way he trained them and made them mean. Over and over and over she would draw a tree with a branch and a swing. There were birds in the tree and daisies dense as stars around the roots. Sometimes there
was no one on the swing, and sometimes there was a little stick figure with four arms. Two of the arms held the ropes of the swing, the other two stretched straight up like skyrockets stuck to the stick figure's shoulders, like skyrockets waiting to be lit. I thought maybe she had a brother who was a soldier. Maybe he was just resting on the swing with a rifle and a bayonet in each arm. Maybe she was afraid he'd be sent overseas and be killed.

I wonder what stories she told herself about me back then, about me and my drawings and my rows of houses on fire.

She must have done the swing and the four-armed stick person scores of times. Finally I couldn't stand it. One day I leaned over and pointed to the twin bayonets and asked, ‘Why does the kid on your swing have four arms?'

‘They aren't arms. They're wings,' she said.

‘Wings?'

‘It's Jimarcus.'

‘Who's Jimarcus?'

‘Little kid next door. I used to babysit him. My stepdad's dogs got through the fence.'

For what felt like hours, but might have only been seconds, I waited for her to explain and when she didn't, I asked, ‘So what happened?'

‘The dogs ate him. He was three and he flew to heaven before anyone could stop him.'

Our names were called then and we had to go and say hello to our stepdads, a glass wall between. We had to speak through a telephone. We had to say
Hi
,
Dad. I miss you too.

All that was a long time ago but that was the day we began to become blood sisters.

 

One Sunday she didn't come. Every time the guard moved, or the door opened, I'd try not to look up, at least not before I'd counted to ten.
They missed the bus, they missed the bus
, I kept telling myself.
They'll be late, that's all.

They never arrived.

When my mother came back from her visit and my name was called, I did something I had never believed I would do. ‘Is Tiyah's dad still here?' I asked my mother.

‘Who the hell is Tiyah?'

‘You know. The one who's always here when we are. The one whose mother gets called when you do.'

‘Oh,' my mother said. ‘The black whore. How the hell would I know?'

On the telephone, through the glass wall, I asked my stepdad: ‘Is Tiyah's dad still here?'

‘Who's Tiyah's dad?'

‘The one who breeds pit bulls.'

‘Oh him. Yeah, he's still here. Why?'

‘Nothing,' I said. ‘Just wondered. Tiyah and her mom didn't come to see him today.'

‘I wouldn't come either, if he was my fucking dad.'

‘He's really her stepdad.'

‘He's a fucking barbarian.'

 

I didn't know I could miss anyone so much. I wouldn't have believed it. If I'd been called for a TV quiz show and had to list the TEN THINGS I MISS MOST, I would maybe have put her at number 10, after my grandma and grandpa, my kitten that got killed by a car, my Peter Rabbit books that my stepdad threw into the trash, my teacher from fifth grade who told me I'd grow up to become a writer, my favourite TV shows that I can't watch anymore because one of my stepdad's friends smashed the TV. You get the idea.

I started cutting her name. I even started cutting it on my forearm where people could see, except I covered it with long sleeves. I was advertising, I guess. I was sending out messages.
Call 911. Code Red
. My arms were like milk-carton ads for missing kids. After four weeks, no sign
of her, dreams started to fall on my pillow every night. They fell like rain, sometimes like hail. Every morning, my pillow was wet. I slept under water. That's where I wanted to stay. I'm not sure if I was ever awake, even though my mom would pull off the sheets and make me get dressed and drop me off at the school-bus stop. It kept raining dreams. I could put my head on the desk at school and a dream would come. I could lean against the railing on the stairs to the gym and I'd be somewhere else. I'd look up in band practice and find everyone staring at me because they'd all stopped playing but I'd gone on oblivious with a solo riff, a calling song,
Tiyah, Tiyah, Tiyah, where are you?
on my sax. I could be sitting in the visitors' room at the slammer and watching the guard and waiting for my mom to be called and I'd find that the school nurse had been talking to me, or I was in the counsellor's office and I couldn't remember how I got there. I couldn't remember what they'd asked.

They were good dreams that I had. I didn't want to wake up.

In one dream, we would be in a car, me and Tiyah in the back seat, and a mother and father (not mine, not hers) in front, talking to each other like normal mothers and fathers do. And then the mother would reach up, sort of casually, and
stroke the father's hair on the back of his head. And the father would partly turn round and say,
Girls? You want to stop for an ice-cream?
And then, because we hadn't answered, the mother would swivel in her seat and say,
Girls? Why are you crying?
And we wouldn't be able to say a word because happiness was cresting over our levees and we were drowning, and laughing as we drowned.

In another dream, Tiyah and I were eggs, warm in a nest, touching each other. There was a mother. She was brooding over our thin shells and we could feel her heat like the soft feathered underside of a cloud. We hatched. We shivered and held hands, and then we flew, oh how wonderful that was, flying away, wingtip to wingtip, to a safe and tropical place.

And then I dreamed about something that had happened. I dreamed Tiyah was handing me a tight little ball of crumpled paper.
Nobody knows what my last name is,
she was saying.
Except you.