WAY OUT ON the horizon, fog covered the curve of the earth, lolling, rolling in, a wall of white swallowing the neighboring peninsula, funneling through its forests to the mouth of the strait. Claudia watched through her sliding glass door. She could no longer see the fence between her and the shore. Soon, her porch railings and picnic table were erased. Into this roiling blankness came the image of Maria and, unbelievable, the deep longing to tell her sister what she had just done. To ask whether she would be forgiven by the Whom she did not know.
Guilt always felt like their mother, watching from beyond. When it got bad toward the end, Claudia convinced herself there would be visitations, clouds of citrus peel and brown sugar enfolding her in the night, which never materialized.
On her last conscious day, her mother held her hand. “Do well there.”
A buzz began within Claudia’s chest—the urge to scream. “You’re sending me al norte? With him? How do you know he’ll take care of me?”
“Mija.” Her eyes were liquid. “You don’t know what I know. It’s best.”
Late morning light spilled through the wind chimes crowding the hospital ceiling. The spirals of sea glass dangled like jellyfish in thick, poisonous clusters. Her mother sold them before she got sick.
“¿Y María?”
“Her father’s family will take care of her until she’s old enough. Then Thomas will bring her. He promised.”
“Why would he? What do you know? And why just me?”
“Tus dificultades. With boys . . . you will drag her down. Be a good sister.”
Claudia watched fluid drip through the IV. Her books were stacked under the corner table, worn paperbacks abandoned on the beach by hotel guests. A miniature watercolor by Maria was pinned to the wall. A lobster pot. “What if I want to stay?”
“Wherever you are, I will be with you. Our spirit is undivided.”
Claudia imagined an orange, its bright lunar segments flying apart at the touch of one soiled finger, her own. She thought her mother dying was the worst thing. She hadn’t realized how unprotected it left her. She and Maria had never had a dad, it seemed, but in truth, they did have fathers, only that Maria’s walked north for work, and Claudia’s had flown south to play.
Maria escaped the pressures that Thomas heaped on Claudia as though to make up for never having cared before, Claudia studying harder and harder, trying to put her wildness behind her as quickly as possible, not knowing that shame is patient. Her sister arrived years later to attend art school, of all things, having relieved herself of the duty to be more than beautiful and charming. Everyone adored her. It was maddening. Claudia loved Maria—a complex, self-hating love, but love—and yet being compared at close quarters made her want to wriggle out of her skin. As children, they had always been together. Claudia came to measure her own response to the world by how it contrasted with Maria’s, never more clear than the first time their mother showed them how to lobster, one of her many lines of income.
“Take the tail in one hand and the head in the other.” Her callused fingers traced a striped carapace where the lobster’s head separated from its armor. “Twist in opposite directions until you feel the flesh tear.” Its guttural cries quickened. “Keep twisting. Pull the pieces away from each other, like this.”
Her forearm flexed, its scars lengthening as she turned the decapitated head from one side to the next, pivoting its ochre body for her daughters. Lacking claws, the lobster held her hand in a scratchy embrace, whipping its antennae. Its beady eyes bulged.
Translucent pink meat spilled from the tail. Their mother placed the chittering head in Claudia’s palm—its legs crawled, feeble, against her wrist—and encouraged Maria to take the tail. Her sister balked and hid her hands.
Severing her regret, Claudia regarded the interaction at a distance, like a disembodied soul or the anthropologist she would become. She observed herself twisting off five more heads, learning to spot weakness, to find the fissures that widened with pressure. It would come in handy later, in the field.
Managing each brisk beheading, she feigned nonchalance when her mother stopped consoling her sister and noticed her accomplishments scattered on the deck, lifeless. Deep blue water slapped the wooden hull.
That’s when Claudia began to live on two planes of existence at once, marveling at their odd angles of intersection.
Still, it’s terrifying to see the world with yourself inside it. It scared her into performance, if only for her sister’s benefit. Claudia skipped dinner that night. Maria ate her lobster, sopping up the butter with the last heel of bread.
In the states, sisterhood returned with the catty, chatty surety of college friends with a history of long nights and late brunches. Claudia did not question Maria’s motives, but she must have felt abandoned, must have nurtured a long aggrievement, for there could be no other explanation for husband theft. Anger entitled Maria.
Claudia pictured her backyard’s mossy old maple, branches studded with muttering crows. Andrew took the patio furniture. Maria always liked it, the two of them spending summer evenings with bottles of chilled white wine, grilling and listening to the radio while Claudia struggled through revisions. Maria never dedicated herself to anything but her own pleasure, which made her what Andrew wanted Claudia to be, nothing more than available.
“You’re like a guy,” Maria once said. Claudia took it as a compliment. Men did what they wanted. That’s power, she thought, but it was not true. Power was a symphony of personal bloodlettings. She understood that now. True power was getting what you wanted in the end. It didn’t matter what people thought, until it did. Damn her sister.
Claudia pressed her hands and cheek against the coolness of the sliding glass door. Makahs slept near ancestral bones, their blood thick as stone. Every place she lived seemed to crumble out of existence as soon as she left, disintegrating behind her into a pile of rubble.
Maggie was asleep in the big chair by the time Claudia arrived the next morning. Peter saved a plate. Corned beef hash with a twist of orange to the side.
“Let me fry some eggs for you.” Peter heated the cast iron pan.
“I’m not hungry.”
He cut a hunk of butter. It spread into a pool, edges burbling into the black. “I would have done it before, but old eggs aren’t any good.”
She twitched.
With one hand, he cracked two eggs and held their shells apart. Chardonnay-colored whites slid out, yolks bouncing.
She picked up the orange slice. Warm and sweaty, it left an oily sheen on the pale ceramic. She bent the smile from the skin and nibbled the protruding pulp—salted, meaty, tainted. Forcing herself to swallow, she plated the rind so its curls spooned, pith to peel.
“You’re going to need more than that to get through today.”
He tipped the pan over her plate. The eggs tumbled onto the mountain of hash and settled over its crest. Peter pinched some salt from a crusty bowl and threw it on.
She’d resolved not to have any more dealings with him on one level, but beneath it, her body whirred. Sex does that to a person. For a while. Contempt set in once she got to know someone. Carnality ebbs.
The chair creaked. Peter kicked out his long legs. One knee swerved close to hers. “Get to it.”
Claudia hated to be observed while eating. She stared at the plate, stalling.
“Is breakfast your only meal of the day?”
God, he was presumptuous. “Certainly the heartiest.”
“You only eat when we feed you.”
“Don’t get too excited. I ate before I came. I’m just being polite.”
“Eat.”
Claudia watched her hand pick up the fork and slice a corned beef hash patty into wedges. She stabbed and lifted, not looking at him. The state of being thin issued currency that gained value as she aged and her contemporaries thickened in strange places. Men loved women with appetites, praised gluttony as wanton desire, but they didn’t linger over its results. She had always felt better being petite, but lately, eating had become horrible to her, proof of her lack of control. There was no real alternative.
The cheap metal fork sent bitter echoes across her tongue. Fried golden brown, the hash was crispy. Its edges gave, smashing flat as she chewed and swallowed. Her stomach woke up. A second bite, full of fat. A third. This time the side of her fork tore through a glossy egg, which collapsed, oozing its yellow load. She shoveled a thick forkful of yolky hash straight into her mouth, doing her best not to look at him. She could hear her own breath.
Stomach distended, she reached for her coffee. He wrapped his hand around hers. She stilled, warmed by his palm, by the mug. Her body softened. She wanted a cradle of arms, the coolness of a sheet. Sleep stirred in her, dreams lifting and clouding like silt.
His hand found the back of her neck. Her head drooped, bringing her forehead near enough for him to kiss. His lips were dry. She heard him smile, heard the wet smack of his gums, felt his teeth hard against the curve of her skull.
“I have to go.” She spoke to the smear on her plate.
“Stay.” His grip tightened. Lips brushed her ear. “Rest in my room.”
“I can’t do that.”
“My bed’s cleaner than the couch.” He snuffled against her cheek, puffing laughter through his nose. She angled away from him.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Couldn’t sleep?” A hand on her shoulder, so heavy.
“Unlike you, I didn’t get a nap in yesterday.” She resisted his weight on the nape of her neck, withdrawing slow as a boot from mud.
“You stewing on something?”
In fact, she’d lain prone for hours, tallying her losses, luring slumber only to be rushed from it by a rhythmic rocking, the cabin’s, and the sound of wood rubbed with fur, a dry brushing. A bear, no doubt, delighted by this handy corner, scratching its back before a wander down the beach to clamber over the mussel crust of the headlands to the banks of Tsoo-Yess River. Claudia quailed in her bed, cross-examining her own senses, her breath quick and shallow.
“I’m fine.”
“I presume you’ve got things handled on your end.”
“What?”
“Are we all good?”
“Everything will be fine.”
Peter grabbed the nearest leg of her chair. He pulled her across the linoleum and between his legs, jamming his hand beneath her thighs and scooping her onto his lap to kiss her brow. It could be like this, she a leaf, he the river, gripped by gravity together, bobbing in dappled ripples down to the ocean, who would open, take them into herself, their bodies sounding the deep to emerge as eelgrass, hungry for light.
She squirmed. Peter got to his feet, holding her like a bride, and walked out of the kitchen, passing his dormant mother on their way down the hall. Panicked, paralyzed, Claudia made furious faces. He grinned and dared her to speak with his eyes.
It was wrong, but they did it anyway, on the floor of his childhood bedroom. The sick dread of discovery chased her into orgasm. They came hard, almost silent, her body shuddering so hard her back cracked.
“Did you hear that?” Her eyes snapped open.
His smile was contented. “Hear it? I was about to hide in a doorway.”