THEY BRING ME a body. They bring her in here and lay her on my couch. Glorette. Like we in Louisiana, when Michel get thrown from the mule and kick him in the head and they bring him to Auntie Viola house and she tell me, Sit here with me, bebe, so I don’t lonely while he don’t left alone.
Marie-Claire crossed herself first. Then she stood looking at Glorette’s ribs in the space of skin between the sports bra and the tight exercise pants. The two curved bones on each side of her heart, because she lay on her back. Head awkward without a pillow.
“You cold, Maman?” Reynaldo said.
Marie-Claire looked up at her two sons. She had tucked her left arm under her breasts, and her right arm crossed over them, thumb on the marble of bone atop her shoulder. She felt dizzy for a moment. This was how she’d held herself when she was nervous since she was twelve and grew breasts, and her mother began to hide her from Mr. McQuine. She always thought if she covered her chest with her arms—like a scarf wrapped around her upper body—she would be safe. She always pressed down on that round little bone with her thumb while she tried to figure out what to do.
Reynaldo slid the blanket off the end of the wing chair and put it around her.
She thought, How I’m cold and it was 109 today? None y’all ever see I do this? She said, “Quiet. Them kids.”
“Oh, shit,” Lafayette whispered. “If they come out here and see—” The four grandchildren slept in his old back bedroom.
She nodded.
Reynaldo said, “They’d kill us.”
His wife Clarette was working late shift at the prison. Lafayette’s wife Cerise, with her nametag and low heels and hair in a bun—she’d gone straight from her job to the movies with a friend.
Glorette dead but still with a face like a pansy, purple and gold and the cheekbones mischevious. Marie-Claire bent to touch her forehead. Gold and unmarked, except two faint lines above her brows from squinting in the sun. She’d been working, too.
They’d all picked oranges. But now Glorette would have been squinting to recognize men. Under a streetlight, in darkness of a parking lot.
“Quo faire?” Marie-Claire said quietly to Enrique. He stood at the foot of the couch. Lafayette and Reynaldo moved to the doorway, looking away from her.
“She get kill in the alley,” he said in French. He turned to his sons. “What his name—the one find her?” he said to them in English.
“Sidney Chabert,” Lafayette said. “He said he was comin out the taco place and he saw her in the alley. In a cart.”
“Cart?” Marie-Claire smelled shit, and for a moment she thought of the huge cane carts the mule used to pull.
“Shopping cart.”
Outside the big picture window, past her roses and sunflowers, the truck was parked on the grass, and a man was walking toward the long gravel road that led to the orange groves and the gate. “Him?”
They looked out the door.
Marie-Claire looked at the red fingernails, chipped like squirrels had been chewing on the paint. The thin hand—palm up, curled as if holding a secret. The plump little palm Anjolie used to kiss, then tickle with her fingernails when she wanted to waken Glorette from the nap after kindergarten. All five of the girls in the back of Enrique’s truck, going off to the school in the morning, and then napping on blankets here in the living room in the hot September afternoons because Marie-Claire had the only window cooler back then.
When she watched them climb into the truck for the first day of kindergarten, it felt like someone jammed a toothpick into her heart. Five tiny faces. She remembered climbing into the Apache on that frozen winter day in Louisiana with the other four girls, lying on the bags of rice under the tarp, because Mr. McQuine said she was next.
Glorette dead on the couch. These girls were supposed to be safe. “You bring her here? You ain’t call the police?”
Enrique was watching the retreating back of the young man with no shirt. “That the one?” Marie-Claire said.
Then her husband turned his head slowly toward her, the way he did. Like his body was a lighthouse and his eyes the light. He never moved his shoulders, just his head, when he was looking over the orange trees to see the color of the fruit, or studying the children to see who’d stolen the piece of chicken she’d set aside for herself on the counter, or thinking he had to kill someone.
She knew that look. He’d killed Mr. McQuine after they were driven away in the Apache. But she’d seen his face, his eyes—that unhurried calculating grace—before she left Louisiana. And she’d seen it a hundred times here, when he was deciding something.
“How you gon bring her here?” she said to her sons, but they were already looking out at the grove road. Their big muscled arms a little soft now, the white tank tops, Reynaldo with two black grease stains along his collarbone. They spent the evening working on someone’s car down at the barn, and then they went off to the liquor store. They loved only each other, just as their father loved only his own brother.
Her husband with his clean white t-shirt, his forearms so much darker than his throat, his wrists roped with veins like winter vines stripped of leaves. He was shorter and thinner than his boys. He squinted at Glorette, then at the window. He was already trying to figure out who he was hunting.
He lifted his chin, which moved her sons toward the door, and told them, “Get Gustave.”
HE SAID, “ONCE he bring her to Lafayette and Reynaldo, she been move. Police would taken them in.”
“If they find out she here—” she said, but he shook his head.
“They don’t find out.” He sat down on the wing chair and looked at Marie-Claire. She moved the skin over her shoulderbone with her thumb. He said, “Graveyard love.”
Graveyard love was what had killed Gustave’s father, back in the twenties. Graveyard love—you would kill to keep it, or die to have it.
But Marie-Claire shivered violently, once, down her spine like somebody ripped a cord from a bag of feed. Graveyard. The man her husband had killed to save her was in a graveyard in Louisiana. But the man he’d killed to get this house and these orange trees was buried somewhere here. Enrique didn’t know she knew.
And now he looked out the window with that lighthouse gaze. He was planning to kill whoever had murdered this child—who was not a child now. He’d come home after doing it and sleep beside Marie-Claire.
GUSTAVE CAME IN, gray hair long and waved by sweat on the back of his burned neck. His wife Anjolie used to trim it, but she’d passed five years ago.
He knelt beside his daughter. He murmured something to Enrique.
She said, “Law say you call the coroner, say she die here at home. But he take her down there and find she got—”
She didn’t want to say anything about the drugs. She could see fingernail scratches on Glorette’s collarbone. Anyone could have put them there. She could have scratched herself. The alley—they said she was in the alley.
When they first got to California, she and the other girls, she walked in that alley from the boardinghouse to Archuleta’s liquor store for salted plums. The first Spanish word she learned—saladitos. She was seventeen. After a windstorm, hundreds of palm fronds hung from the telephone wires like golden lion tails. Like nothing Marie-Claire had ever seen.
“You need to move her,” she whispered in French to Enrique. “Them kids in the back.”
But Gustave said, “I tell her son she die here. On the couch. Not in the alley.”
Before she could answer, they walked out to the truck.
So if the police came, and she was sitting here, she was the one wrong. Her chest was full of anger, not hot but tight like someone reached in to close fingers around her heart—like the hand that rose from the grave in those scary movies.
But they were going to get the boy.
SO HE DON’T left alone. Can’t leave them alone. The dead.
Cause of spirit?
Cause of fly. Rat. Spirit. Thief. Sais pas, who come.
She had been five. 1947. She sat in the wooden chair beside her aunt’s wide soft thigh. Cotton dress so thin she could feel the long hard scar from a cane knife when she kept her hand on the leg to make sure her aunt didn’t leave her there with Michel. His mouth held shut with a scarf. Silver half-dollars on his eyes. His hands folded on his chest, a bowl beside his body for money to help pay for the coffin.
She pulled her chair close to Glorette. How long had she been dead? She picked up the right hand, dangling closest to her, and moved the fingers. Rubbery and a little stiff. Like old carrots. What if it took them hours to find her son?
And the smell of her. Poop and pee—her grandchildren’s favorite words when they were little. She poop, grammere. She stinky.
On my couch. No.
Marie-Claire allowed herself the tears now. She wiped her cheeks with the hard edge of her hand and felt the calluses scrape her temples. God-damn it. Midnight and you bring me a body. I had but five hours sleep last night—Enrique come in late from checkin that irrigation, and then a coyote woke me up howlin.
I already washed four loads today. God-damn it! Rey Jr. done throw up twice.
Glorette’s mouth had fallen open now. Not wide, but as if she were trying to speak. Her eyes still open.
Terrible. I should be crying to help Anjolie mourn in heaven. But they bring me a body like I know what to do. Enrique the one left behind two bodies. Who had to wash them?
Who he think he kill tonight? Who wash that one?
I have to wash this woman who was a baby in the bathtub with Fantine. Two faces turned up from the soapsuds with matching white beards. Call them Santa Babies. I put a shivery little piece soapsud on each head like whipcream.
12:45. SHE DIALED her daughter’s number. The cell phone rang only twice before Fantine’s voice said, “Hey, I’m in Zurich—I’ll get back to you.”
Zurich was Switzerland. Marie-Claire knew because Fantine had been there before. Fantine had brought a magazine with a story about Zurich, with pictures of rivers and hotels and restaurants. Sometimes when she heard Fantine say a city on the voicemail, she had no idea where her daughter was in the world.
Fantine might be home tomorrow. But she would never touch a body.
She heard a small voice. A murmur from the back bedroom. A bad dream.
The grandkids. Cerise had planned to leave them overnight. She called Clarette, who whispered, “I’m not supposed to answer the phone.”
“You finish at one?”
“They asked could I stay til three. Somebody’s late.”
“No. Come straight home at one.”
“Home?”
“Here.”
Clarette’s voice was sharp with fear. “The kids okay?”
Marie-Claire closed her eyes. “Rey Jr. thrown up. Come home fast as you can,” she whispered. It was nothing, but it would bring Clarette here.
If the kids heard voices, they’d come toward the light in the living room.
MY COUCH. THAT poop. She went quickly to the kitchen and got out the oldest oilcloth table covering. The one they used outside when she made gumbo in the yard on the electric fire because it was so hot. Hot in here now. The body would start to smell.
And she didn’t have much time now before it grew truly stiff. “Wait too long you can’t move no arm, no leg,” she remembered Auntie Viola saying to someone. “Like you break em.”
She stood with the oilcloth rolled up in her arms and looked down at Glorette.
Even with the smell, it was the mouth that hurt more. Because it made Glorette look dumb.
She went back down the hallway. Marie-Claire stopped at the door of Lafayette and Reynaldo’s old bedroom but heard nothing. No whispering. No whimpering.
In her room, she got the silk scarf from the top drawer. Fantine had brought it for her from Milan, Italy. She sat beside Glorette and pushed up gently on the chin. The bone so small. She tied the scarf tightly, and Glorette looked like a strange foreign star from an old movie.
She had to close those eyes. Her own eyes stung again like alcohol, with tears. She used to love looking at that face, when the girl came over and her son Victor was just a baby. Never see that color again. Anjolie used to say, Them eyes, like just when the sun go down. Dark purple. Make Elizabeth Taylor eyes look like nothing.
What had they put on her own grandmother’s eyes? The old people didn’t even have money back then. No coins.
Bags of rice.
She quickly put rice in two small baggies and tied them off. Glorette’s eyelids were traced with the tiniest veins like red thread. Was that from how she died?
That smell. She was too angry now to cry. The yoga pants tight and black. Was Glorette even wearing panties? Marie-Claire went to the hallway, the old linen cupboard with the drop-down front panel on which she used to fold tablecloths. She’d kept baby supplies in there when the grandkids were small. Those wipes—were they still moist?
No. I am not doin this. Had her aunt felt the same way when they brought Michel—a grown man, weighed about two hundred pounds? What had her aunt done with him, on the makeshift cooling board of a door propped on two sawhorses? All the old women had come to help.
Mo tou soule. Enrique always said that. Me, I’m all alone.
But he had never been, since Gustave.
Mo tou soule, she chanted to herself, pulling down the yoga pants, the red bikini underwear. If Gustave was telling her son she’d come here to rest on the couch, and she’d died right here, peaceful and unexpected, she couldn’t be wearing anything but what she always wore.
The poop was nothing. Less than a baby. Glorette never ate anything. She smoked whatever it was they smoked. But the pee was sharp and strong, and Marie-Claire’s chest heaved. She wiped Glorette’s bottom with the moist babywipe, breathing through the neckline of her nightdress pulled up over her mouth and nose. She didn’t have time to take off the yoga pants. So tight. She couldn’t leave the girl exposed like this on the couch, on the oilcloth of picnics and gumbo, to run back and get perfume. She pulled the wet pants back up, and heard Enrique’s truck moving slowly down the gravel road through the trees.
She slid Glorette off the oilcloth, ran to the bedroom and got an ancient bottle of Jean Nate. She left the oilcloth on the floor beside her slippers. Then she sprayed Anjolie’s daughter, as if she were going to a dance.
But she wouldn’t lie on her back, if she were resting. That looked wrong. She clasped the body to her, bent Glorette’s arms, which were resisting now, like those old Barbie dolls with their legs that would move but stubbornly, and pulled her onto her side. She lifted the bags of rice from the eyes, praying. They stayed closed. She pulled the scarf from the jaw and smoothed the hair. She hid those behind the pillow and tucked around Glorette’s legs the blanket Reynaldo had draped around her own shoulders.
Hot as hell. She wouldn’t sleep with no blanket. But now her son ain’t have to see them wet pants. The truck headlights lit up the red roses along the flowerbed, the petals burnt black at the edges by the sun.
HER SON’S HAIR was a sunburst of on-purpose tangles. Dreads. His eyes were the same purple as his mother’s. He sat on the floor beside her body and didn’t move for a long time.
And she couldn’t say to him, “You have to go. Them kids come out here…”
Because their mamas didn’t want them to scar for life by a dead body. And his mama the body. He was so scarred she couldn’t imagine it.
WHEN GUSTAVE TOOK him across the street to his house, Enrique sent Lafayette and Reynaldo down to the barn.
In the kitchen, she whispered, “They make a coffin?” she said. “You serious?”
His eyes were distant and narrowed as shards of brown glass.
She said, “Fantine in a plane. Cerise at the movies. Clarette workin late shift. You ain’t sit here. Cause you go lookin for who done it.”
He picked up the empty silver coffee pot and she said, “I can’t even make coffee for stay up all night, not til you bring somebody sit with her.” She went back to the front room and knelt down by the couch. “You go get Archuleta.”
“Ramon?” He stared at her.
“The other one. The uncle. The priest. Tell the priest tomorrow. And bring that ice. The one for Halloween. The one make smoke.”
“I bring you coffee from Archuleta’s.”
“Drink no dishwater, me.” Her shoulders began to shake, and she was crying now. “The grandkids back there. They see her, all I hear from Cerise and Clarette is ‘scar for life.’ All they talk about—you let em fall out the tree, you let em eat too much candy. You need to put her in Fantine room. Quiet.” She pushed him toward the living room. “Can’t scar you. You see dead body before.”
He lifted his chin at her, eyes even narrower, just a crescent of glitter in the hallway light. “Been in the war, me,” he said. “You ain’t see no dead body. You been here.”
She turned away, thinking about the night Beto had come here and gotten drunk.
NEVER TRUST NO smiling man, her mother had said. Not one smile all the time.
Her mother had run the plate lunches and dinners in Sarrat. That way she and Marie-Claire didn’t have to go in the canefields.
When Marie-Claire was five, she began by sorting through the dry red beans for stems and sticks, then sifting the rice through her fingers for pebbles. After that she snapped the ends off green beans. Sitting on the two wooden steps that led to the porch where her mother plucked feathers from the chickens she killed three days a week, or stripped the bones from the fish she bought the other three days.
Her mother meant the men who walked casually into the yard from the road, a few men from the canefields but sometimes strangers. Men who smiled and grinned while they talked to her mother about cutting some wood or fixing a fence. They wanted free food.
Every time, her mother said, Ganlargent, mo so fast it was like one word. Four words—make some money, me.
She whispered to Marie-Claire, “Man better smile tou soule li.”
Only for you.
Enrique and Gustave showed up in 1949. They’d been in Sarrat as children. Gustave smiled and nodded sometimes. But when he came in after working the canefields, Enrique kept his eyes guarded, his head slanted to the left while he studied everyone in the front room buying plates of chicken and rice and greens.
She was sixteen. He was over thirty. But after a month, when he came into the yard, he took off his hat in a motion, ducked his head toward her, and smiled so slowly it seemed five minutes before she saw his white white teeth.
Now he came out of his daughter’s room with the smell of perfume on his arms, about to go hunt someone.
NO ONE EVER slept in her daughter’s daybed now. The chair was still at Fantine’s desk, where she had written her first stories. When Marie-Claire moved the chair to sit beside Glorette, two magazines fell off. Vogue. The woman’s lips glossy as candied apple. A story about Italy. Pictures of narrow stone streets, and hams. Fantine was in Zurich right now, tasting someone else’s food, listening to what they said.
And I have to wash Glorette feet. All them miles, up and down the alley. See the same faces some night, see some stranger. Must be the stranger kill her.
She took off the high-heeled sandals. The ankles like clay. She tied up the jaw again, and put the baggies of rice back on the eyes. Then Clarette burst through the front door and Marie-Claire heard her say, “Rey Jr. still sick?”
She saw the light in Fantine’s room, just off the kitchen, and came inside. Her uniform was black, her boots like military.
“Oh, hell, no. No. No.”
“I’m sorry, bebe.”
“Sorry?” Clarette twirled and put her hands to her temples. “No. I am not this person. I am not these people.”
“She your people.”
“I am not the people who get high all night and die and then my kids have to see a dead body. I am not the one who touches a dead body and then the cops find out and I lose my job. No. Oh, hell no. I am not doing this.”
“Hush and them kids don’t see nothin. Hush! She sleep in here. You pick up them kids one by one and take em Felonise house. You call Cerise and tell her and her maman come home. And then you help me right here.”
“Cause you know Cerise ain’t gon do it.”
“Oui. I know. And baby—” Because Clarette was more like her own daughter now, since Clarette’s mother had died when she was only fourteen, and she had never known her father, and her brother was gone, too—“I wish I didn’t have to ask you. I wish Lafayette could carry em. And you sleep. But he gotta build the coffin.”
“Oh, my God,” Clarette said, putting her palms to her temples again, so her elbows looked like wings. “You can’t just bury someone out here.”
Marie-Claire saw the whole place then, in her head, as if she were in the police helicopter that circled like a hornet over the riverbed, looking at homeless camps. The orange groves laid out in rows where she and these girls had moved up and down in straight lines, picking Valencias, all these years. Enrique’s barn, and the eight tiny white houses on the narrow street, and her own larger house right here on the rise, surrounded by bougainvillea. He had bought it with more than money. He’d killed Atwater, slowly, and then buried him somewhere out there.
Clarette said, “I can’t believe—”
Marie Claire waited. Can’t believe she’s dead, can’t believe Enrique expected them to bury here here, can’t believe—
Then Clarette came closer. “How does she still look beautiful?” she whispered. “All these years and her hair like that.” The long black hair cascaded through the wrought-iron curlicues on the daybed. Take two to do the hair, Marie-Claire thought. But I can do her nails.
“So damn illegal,” Clarette whispered. “I’ll lose my job if the cops come. Damn! I just finished a ten-hour shift!”
“What you think I done? I got up at six and made breakfast for Enrique and Gustave and your husband.”
“Like I’m happy he’s staying out here in the barn!”
Reynaldo had left Clarette two years ago. “I ain’t happy, me. But here he was in my kitchen at seven. And then I cleaned this house and washed all the sheets, and you brought me them kids at four. Rey-Rey done throw up twice cause he ate too many Otter Pops. The box got fifty and whole thing gone.”
“How you let—”
“How I let? You think I can keep a eye on all four of em and it was 109 outside? I try keep everything in the yard alive.”
“I been tired longer than you been alive. You don’t want do this, go home. But you gotta take them kids with you.” Marie-Claire stood up and went to Fantine’s closet so she wouldn’t scream at her daughter-in-law. Not a closet. This had been a breakfast nook, not a bedroom. And the armoire filled with clothes Fantine would never look at again, and things she’d left after college.
The dress Fantine had worn to high school graduation. Glorette was still exactly the same size as seventeen. But she’d had Victor the week of graduation. Marie-Claire took out the dress—silky and slippery. What they called the fabric—Qiana?
Clarette twirled twice more and then went toward the door.
“Don’t tell Felonise why. Tell her I don’t feel good.” Clarette closed the door behind her.
Marie-Claire heard her going down the hallway, heard the murmuring, and she heard the heavy footsteps of Clarette carrying the first one.
WHEN SHE CAME back, she said, “Oh, my God.”
Marie-Claire had taken off the clothes and put them in a white plastic trash bag with red ties. Glorette’s breasts were dappled with scars. Tiny white chrysanthemums. Eight. Someone had burned her with cigarettes. Marie-Claire put the white sheet over her chest.
Clarette said hoarsely, “What you want me to do first?”
“Help me with the diapers.”
She remembered vague things about what her aunt had done. There was still more waste in the body. Her aunt had used rags, but there were also four diapers left in the cupboard, from when Teeter was potty-training. They were large, but not large enough. Marie-Claire opened them up and overlapped three. She cut the fourth into pads.
“Push down on her stomach.” Not much more pee came out. Not like when you had a baby and they had to push out all the afterbirth and blood poured from you like you’d grown a river inside and not a baby. When she had Lafayette she was eighteen and her mother was back in Louisiana. Two white nurses at the hospital pushed down so hard on her belly she screamed they were killing her, and one said, “Don’t be ignorant.”
Clarette seemed stunned. Her braids held back by an elastic, but one came out and brushed against Glorette’s shoulder. The bead at the end knocking the bone. She jumped and Marie-Claire said, “Just sit down here. On this chair.”
Marie-Claire dumped the diapers into the trash bag. She filled a basin with vinegar and water, and washed out Glorette’s privates. She covered the body with the sheet. She threw the wet paper towels in the bag, too. Not like rags, where you had to wash them, burn them, or bury them—back in the old days. Now she said, “Don’t move. Sit right there. She don’t be lonely.”
At the trashcans behind the house, she dropped the lid quietly. Nightbirds were singing in the eucalyptus windbreak. One mockingbird in the sycamore at the edge of the yard.
Beto had come one night when the mockingbirds were fighting in the trees, singing longer and longer songs, keeping her awake. He was the Indian man who’d worked here for years before Enrique came to this place after the war. They’d always spent hours in the barn, where Beto sharpened knives and tools in the winter. But that night, he was drunk, and Enrique was gone somewhere with Gustave. Beto said, “How you know he won’t get tired of you next? Just find a way to get rid of you. Bury you out there somewhere. On his land.”
“Why you say that to me?”
“Cause he got this land the wrong way. He knew that white man wouldn’t sell it to him. So he killed him.”
“Maybe they have a fight.” She remembered Beto sitting in the kitchen holding a cup of coffee, having drunk whiskey with Enrique and Gustave all night.
“A fight that lasted ten days? He took ten days to die. I was there.”
“So you help.”
Beto shrugged. He had a long braid down his back and a feathery little moustache over his lip. Two hairs at the end touching the corner of his mouth. He said, “I didn’t know what your husband was doing at first. But he’s stone cold. You thought about that? You’re still young. And beautiful.”
“And I got a baby in the back. Two years old.”
Beto said, “Listen.” And they heard the nightbirds through the window screen in the kitchen. “You never thought about Atwater used to sleep in this house? And where he’s layin now?”
“Ain’t my business.”
Beto said, “Spirits everybody’s business. My old man’s buried over there in Agua Dulce somewhere. I still see him walkin the river at night.”
“I sit in here at night,” Marie-Claire told him, and took away the coffee cup. “And you can sit down in the barn.”
“I ain’t comin back,” Beto said. “I just wanted to see you again.” He stood up. “You sure you ain’t part Indian? That hair? Those eyes?”
“I’m whole married. You seen me. Now you go.”
THE HOUSE WAS silent. Like never. Felonise or someone in the kitchen, children sleeping in the bedrooms, Enrique snoring softly like a rattle had lodged in his throat.
“You got nail polish?” she said to Clarette, who sat staring out the bedroom window.
“Right now?”
“Right now.” Marie-Claire bent to Fantine’s small desk. In the drawer she found polish remover, the pink liquid sharper than the vinegar smell. When Enrique came back with the dry ice and the boys were done with the coffin, she would behead all the roses and put the petals around the body, even between the legs when no one saw.
Clarette dug in her purse and came up with a bottle. Pink as pale and shiny as the inside of a shell. “You know who picked this?” she whispered. “Rey Jr. He said it was the prettiest color he’d ever seen. We were at Target. And Teeter punched him and said that was sissy.”
She stood while Marie-Claire sat in the chair and began taking off the thick red polish, dirty and chipped. The fingers harder now, the wrist tiny but resisting. The skin like a terrible dough spread over the bones.
All that blood pooling inside. Marie-Claire said, “Rey Jr., he ate too many them red Otter Pops. And I had to sit next to him for a while, make sure he ain’t throw up again. He ain’t want me to go. We was right here, cause the porch was so hot and them other kids was in the groves.”
Clarette said, “Greedy.”
“He start talkin about blood.”
“What? What did he see?”
“Non. When you a child, you look around you. Not inside yet. You see a flower, and you don’t know.”
“Know what?” Clarette looked out the window at the sunflowers with their heads hanging.
Marie-Claire said, “Them white flower. Jimsonweed. Rey Jr. said somebody tell him that hell’s bells, and you can die if you touch it. I tell him you have to make a drink from it to die, and he say how do I know? Indian man tell me, when I first get here.”
Beto said Enrique had boiled the jimsonweed and added the liquid to Atwater’s whiskey. He’d killed rabbits and roasted them on spits made of green oleander branches, so the poison entered the flesh.
So she could have this house. So they would be safe. The painting on the wall right here, sent by Fantine from Paris, of a blackbird on a snowy fence in France. The coffee beans from Belize that Marie-Claire had never opened—the package was too beautiful.
She said to Clarette, “You don’t remember, but you always want sugarcane. Back when Gustave grow cane in his yard, and you greedy. Suck on that cane until you have a white beard down your face. You bout five. And then Glorette and Fantine go work the sugarcane in Louisiana one time, help Enrique when somebody die, and you get so mad. Your mama won’t let you go. She say you never go to Louisiana. Never.”
“He got her. That old man.”
“He got her and Claudine and Zizi. Broke her wrist when he throw her down. You remember when I knock Fantine down the porch?”
Her eyes stung from the polish remover. Her own flat hand clapping across Fantine’s face so hard her only daughter fell against the steps. Fantine had talked the others into walking downtown to a rich white girl’s pool party, and the father had touched Glorette on the shoulder, looked at her hard. Glorette told them. And when Marie-Claire told her the story of Mr. McQuine, Fantine had laughed impatiently. As if that could never happen here. As if she never needed to be afraid.
Downtown, where the older houses were, Cerise and Clarette lived a few streets apart. Cerise’s house with shingles painted light blue, and a wrought-iron arch over the sidewalk with jasmine vine. Clarette’s house with stucco painted yellow, and red geraniums Marie-Claire had started for her in coffee cans.
Every room in the house full except this one. So quiet when she was sitting beside Michel, back then. Auntie Viola’s house two doors down the quarter from her mother’s. Plate dinners until midnight, when her mother finally locked the door. People in the front room, in the kitchen, and her trying to sleep in the middle room. “Hush—Marie-Claire dor-me.” But she couldn’t. And now the children here, and the men in the kitchen. Reynaldo fighting with Clarette about money, coming back here to live in the empty stone house deep in the grove. Clarette saying she couldn’t believe Marie-Claire let him eat here, making it easy for him.
“Go check on the coffin,” she said to Clarette now. “See Lafayette get that wood. I be okay here.”
Clarette went out the front door. And Marie-Claire knew she turned her head toward her sleeping children at the little house where Felonise was sitting on her own couch, making sure they had no bad dreams or woke up wanting their mothers, dying to come over here and see what was going on.
Rey Jr. crying after he threw up, saying, “I hate when it comes out my nose!” Saying, “It looks like blood comin out my stomach!” Saying, “How come when we eat steak the blood is gray? If we cooked our blood would it turn black?”
And her saying, “That what color you get when you cut your arm, oui? Get black if you healthy.”
She took the old polish from the last, smallest fingernail. Glorette sitting on this daybed when she was ten. Saying, “This my favorite place to take a nap. In the whole world. You wake up at my house, you see the wall. You wake up here, you see the flowers right by your face. Or the moon. Remember you let me sleep until dark once? The moon came up all perfect right there.” She’d touched the window glass.
The fingers hard now. The nails would keep growing? Marie-Claire shook the polish. Need to do that hair. But I don’t want touch it yet.
She studied the pale pink. And Glorette’s eyelids, shadowy and purple. I have to do makeup, too.
“So you don’t be lonely,” Marie-Claire said quietly. “I sat in my mama’s house look at a magazine, and I wanted nail polish so bad. They ain’t had it at the corner store. Just food and cigarettes and beer. She taken me to Baton Rouge once and I got red nail polish. Red as blood. I paint my nails and then Mr. McQuine get Mary. They put us in the truck. I was sixteen. We come here, and then Enrique show up two years later.”
She opened the bottle. The smell so strong.
“I paint my nails every Saturday, after we got married, and then I had to pick oranges, and wash them diaper, and kill them chicken. But I paint em anyway. We went to the five-and-dime on Palm. Why not nickel-and-dime? All you girls got candy. I got a new color once a month. They had names on the back. Fantine used to tell me. Candy Apple. Apricot Dream. I wonder who name all them color.”
Atwater must have slept in the bedroom she shared with Enrique. He had to be buried somewhere by the river.
All those Saturdays, her boys in the other bedroom playing the radio. Marvin Gaye. Girl you give me good feelin—sugar—something like sanctified.
She pulled Glorette’s hand to her, that motion she wished all her life she could do for Fantine, and dropped the first tiny pearl of pink on a fingernail.