Hex: A Novel (27 page)

Because I am afraid of what I will find if I wander any further, I admit it. Because I know what Thalia would have had to become in order to leave nothing of herself behind.

And still in my dreams that scrap of fabric flutters down from the smoke-gray sky. Singed around its edges, but whole and, as it unfolds at the fire chief’s feet, revealing in one of its many soft, bruised eyes, the single burning ember that would have caught and consumed it had not the chief brought down his sturdy boot and stamped it out against the curb.

Now it is night, very late. I have gotten up alone and come down to my own room to write. I brought you along, Ingrid, so that if you cried I wouldn’t have to run up the stairs again to
fetch you. Though you woke up the moment I slid my hands under your back, you are now lying in your basket at my feet looking at the sheen of my lamp reflected on the window glass in what seems like perfect contentment. I have spent all the months of your life—not so many, I could count them on one hand—wondering what it is you see and what it is you don’t see. Now I am beginning to think it doesn’t matter: that we all see some things meant only for our own eyes.

Today Daniel received some important correspondence from his publisher and when he told us about it at dinner he said, “This is finally the beginning for me.” He said this as he chewed, his beard wagging below his jaw as if mimicking him. You were sitting in my lap, Ingrid, and across from us was a window framing the last creeping light of day as it slunk across the meadow, an empty chair, a burn mark etched indelibly in wood.

“This book is closer to home,” Daniel said. “It had to be, given the circumstances.” He was gesturing with his fork, pointing at you, Ingrid, at me, out the windows to the dark meadow which we nevertheless understood was green and white, a faint blue along the razor edges of the grass, yellow dusting the fat, glossy blades.

“I used the cemetery here as a starting point,” Daniel said, twirling his fork to encompass us all. His cheeks were flushed above his beard and below, the glow fading down his neck where it broke up into a rashy red just above his shirt collar. At the far end of the table, Jacob stood up abruptly and poured himself more water from the blue enamel pitcher I had set just slightly out of reach of everyone. On purpose, Ingrid, on the principle that it is important to remind your lover of his desires, your husband of his need.

“A theoretical starting point, of course,” Daniel continued.
“I hope you don’t mind. My editor said the second book needed to contain more of myself and I thought, at the time, how? How, given my previous model for research, how can I be in this book in any way other than the great white sahib—the eye, you understand, the observer who can only see himself reflected in the quaint ritual around him? I tell you, it made my skin crawl. But then, well, then the accident happened and the baby was born.” He stabs at you again, Ingrid, and in my lap I feel you stiffen in a way I believe means you are amused. “And suddenly I was already in the book, all the research I had done, all the theory. . .It was always me, I just had no perspective, no applicable counter tension to put pressure on the data set.” He put his fork down carefully beside his plate. He considered the remains of the chicken splayed before him. “So then I sat,” Daniel said, “and for a long time I thought about death.”

Daniel thinks about death and his face blooms open, petal upon petal ringing each replication of its shape like a dandelion. A dozy weed, a sun nodder. Jacob snorted, but made no other comment and I, who always think this way, looked up at the window expecting to see something. There was nothing there, only the grid of the window screen sectioning all our reflections into manageable squares of color and smeared light. When something did come, it was only a small white moth attracted by the same bleary brightness. It pumped its body against the screen and stayed for a long time, crawling from sill to sill, battering its faint wings as if they themselves were curtains it was attempting to draw.

“What could it have been?” the artist might have mused and, though he settled on hair, I believe any number of more appropriate images might have flitted through his mind first. I,
for example, might have painted a fork or a crown of bees. A peignoir blooming as if swollen with water, a cairn of loosely stacked stones, a rabbit that runs and runs, its legs on a hinge, its ears laid flat against its skull.

“I’m not criticizing,” Thingy said. “It’s beautiful. Like an homage,” and she put her hands over my shoulders and pulled me into her, both of us leaning awkwardly over the barrier of her suitcase. I could smell her hair—a crisp, mobile scent that stood out to me even through the exotic garden layers of shampoo and perfume—and I felt her take my own hair and wrap the braid around her fist, tug gently like it was a steamboat pull as she had done when we were children and knew without thinking what was in each other’s thoughts.

“I’m glad to be here,” Thingy said and I, overcome at the foot of my own stairs, hearing my husband come up the porch and a man I didn’t yet know behind him, talking already, kicking his boots against the sill, I said, “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” said my Thing. She pulled away and looked at me, her eyes water eyes, coruscate, opaque. “You silly goose,” she said and kissed me on the cheek.

When Thingy and I were twelve and Luke sixteen, the Nina drove us down to Ridley Township to see a movie. It was a foreign film, a princess movie, which was only playing in the rickety art house theatre that sat in the center of the downtown. To save money, the Nina had brought snacks with us: dried apple rings she fished out of the bottom of an oversized freezer bag, a sack of hard candies Thingy and I split, Thingy only eating the purple ones until her tongue was slick and almost black with the dye. The Nina ended up being disappointed in the show. “Too
much music and not enough songs,” she said, “and why were the animals so unfriendly? Their eyes were drawn so beady you could hardly see them.”

In the movie, the princess was spunky, but very very small. At one point she and her entire castle were lifted into the air by a girl with golden ringlets who mistook the thing for an elaborate, sugar-spun candy. She was a stupid girl, willful, but from the princess’s point of view she had teeth like slabs of mountain rock and when they crunched down on the spires of the castles—not sugar-spun at all, but crumbling just the same—the danger was the princess’s to bear alone. All the unfriendly animals had fled long ago; the rats from the pantry, the pigeons from the eves. She had no parents and there appeared to be no prince waiting in the wings to rescue her or awaken her or marvel at her technique with a spindle. In the end, the stupid, greedy girl was somehow thwarted, but the castle which wasn’t candy was not saved. The princess, I assume, continued on spunkily in the ruins. Taking a turn in the garden. Tossing her little golden ball up into the air.

“I wish the girl had eaten her,” Thingy said.

“Me too,” said the Nina. “Then there could have been scene like in Pinocchio with the castle floating around in her belly.”

We had gone to the morning show and when we got back to the house it was only early afternoon. The Sainte Maria had taken part of the Nina’s shift, watching Luke so the Nina could take us with her, and her battered sedan was parked carelessly across the driveway, forcing us to park in the street. It was fall, the trees already drawing themselves up, moving away from us.

Instead of trudging into the house after the Nina, who was tired of us, happy to leave us behind, Thingy led the way around the side of the building and into the backyard. Though it wasn’t
yet cold, the air around us was stiff and heavy with chill. Thingy and I were both shivering, but I understood she didn’t want the trip to end—to return home, even if it is not your own home, is always a small defeat—also, the Sainte Maria was there, the one person who could make Thingy self conscious and whose company she tried to avoid. Thingy plucked a glossy pink strawberry barrette out of her hair and turned it over between her fingers as she perched on the bend in the dragon’s tail. She touched it with the tip of her tongue, as if she expected it to have turned into a candy, and then tossed it over the fence into the dog run where it sat in the dirt catching my eye no matter how I tried to ignore it.

“What is actually in our stomachs?” Thingy asked.

“Digestive juices,” I answered. I was in the advanced biology course at school and had memorized the diagram of a cat’s body, drawn splayed open with the animal’s head turned coyly to the side, the tips of her longest teeth just peeping out from underneath her lip. We had studied what each of the organs did, which filled with air and which with bile, and I understood that the general principle was the same for us all. Here a sac to store poisons, here one to distribute blood. A series of taut pink purses to be filled and then emptied and somewhere under all that fur the various holes through which this would be accomplished.

“I know that,” Thingy said, annoyed with me. She flounced up the back stairs and I followed, a few steps below her. “I meant in addition to that. Like are there things we’re too huge to bother about? Little bits of things that just stay in there and rattle around?”

She was thinking of Pinocchio, of course, and the giant girl in the movie. What could there be inside myself that I don’t know about, Thingy was thinking. A raft? An oil lantern? The
remnants of a breakfast strewn across the table? But I was annoyed too, and cold now, ready to go inside.

“No,” I said as Thingy scrambled up the railing to peer in the kitchen window. I climbed up next to her and rested my chin beside the dragon’s head. “The only thing in your stomach is purple candy.”

“Says you,” Thingy said, but her heart wasn’t in the argument anymore. In the kitchen we could see the Nina, the Sainte Maria and Luke all sitting around the table. The Sainte Maria and Luke were finishing lunch, a bowl of soup sitting in front of my brother, her plate empty and serving as an ashtray. The Nina sat with her head tipped in her hand and nodded as the Sainte Maria said something, smoke spilling out from between her lips. Luke was between them, his eyes not quite engaged but not so far away as for it to be impossible to imagine him listening, about to contribute his own opinion to whatever it was the girls were trying to decide.

“Look at Luke,” Thingy said. His hands were on the table, on either side of the bowl, and he moved them restlessly. The Nina said something and he inclined his head toward her, as if conceding the point, a lock of his hair falling across his eye. The older Luke got the more he looked like my father. A face that was at once both sharp and wide, gaunt cheeks. His shoulders were square inside his T-shirt, and his hands broad and thick knuckled. They curled on either side of his bowl like plaster casts, white and somehow slightly dusty. The Nina said something else and the Sainte Maria laughed and brought a spoonful of soup up to Luke’s lips. He turned his head to her and accepted it ruminatively, again as if he were just on the verge of saying something. A drop splashed out over his lips and landed on his chin. The Pinta, or even the Nina, would have scooped the soup
up with the spoon, dabbing at Luke as if he were an infant, but the Sainte Maria folded the sleeve of her shirt over her thumb and brushed it away without looking at him, her fingers trailing across his cheek.

“What about him?” I said. He was my brother—my brother struck dumb at the moment of his birth—and I paid as much attention to him as I did to myself. Which is to say, we were bodies only, bulging and softening as bodies did. My favorite part of my own body was my breastbone which protruded from in between the new nubs of my breasts as hard and stubborn as a turtle’s shell. My favorite part of Luke’s was his ear, pink and white, whorling in tightening spirals: in, in, in.

The Nina laughed and leaned across the table. She gripped the Sainte Maria’s wrist and shook it, resting her head on her forearm. The Sainte Maria laughed, too. She looked up across the kitchen and saw us at the window, but it meant nothing to her. She kept laughing. She stubbed her cigarette out on the plate.

“Fuck you,” Thingy said and pulled away. Luke cocked his head as if he were listening and his lips parted, a smile? For a moment it seemed as if he were opening his mouth to say. . . .

Later in the week, Thingy was over at my house after school to do homework. This meant we sat in front of the television with our books open before us and a bowl of chips at our side. Thingy liked to slick her fingers with their grease and draw translucent designs on the book’s glossy pages. We were studying the economic output of our mountains and marking maps the teacher had given us with little drawings of apples and hogs, cairns of coal, reams of cloth, different colored triangles which were supposed to represent the spiteful wink of minerals and gems.

Thingy got up to go to the bathroom. As the final credits came up on the show, I realized she had been gone a long time. She didn’t answer when I called to her, so I crept through the house—turtle-like, slow to everything—thinking perhaps we were playing a game.

I found her in Luke’s room, lying on the bed with him. Clearly, she had spent some time arranging the tableau. She had rolled him over onto his side and tipped him so she bore the brunt of his weight on her hip. His hand was on her ribcage, just under her breast, and his right leg was cocked over her thigh. His face was buried in her hair and when she saw me in the doorway she put a finger to her lips and raised an eyebrow—as if he were telling her something, as if she were delighted to hear.

“He says he likes this game,” Thingy whispered, and wasn’t there, sleek in the rustle of Thingy’s fine-spun hair, just the slightest of movements? As if he had nodded, his head sharp and black as a snake’s. . .a whuffling as if he had chuffed between his pale, parted lips, blown into her ear. . .

Then Thingy jumped up, sliding out from under my brother’s limbs as he shifted more deeply into the pillows, and said, “I was just kidding, Alice. You should have seen your face.” She sat on the edge of the bed and motioned me to help her as she tugged Luke back into a more accustomed place: his impassive face propped at an angle, his long legs bent and his smooth feet crossed over each other on the coverlet. “Look though,” Thingy said, pointing to the crotch of my brother’s sweatpants where the outline of his penis was clearly visible, its bulge rising against his thigh. “He was telling the truth, after all.”