THE OESTRIDAE

ROBERT LEVY

White dust rises from the road like tobacco smoke, followed by the grinding of car wheels on dry Pennsylvania dirt as a silver compact rumbles into view, up the hill on its way to the house. “Who’s that?” I say, but Dara only shakes her head and continues to chew at her hair. The spit-wet strands fall from my sister’s lips, her gaze lifting until she rises, pulled from the Adirondack chair as if hefted on a rope. It’s an August scorcher, the space between us and the road shimmering with heat as we wait for the sky to shift like a sieve and let the rain tumble through, the air a thick wool blanket. It’s been humid like this for a month now, ever since our mother disappeared. And just when I think I’ve finally run out of hope, one last drip of it leaks out to ruin everything.

Near the end of the drive the car stops, about thirty yards from the house. We move as one to the porch steps, the windows of the compact filthy with bone-gray dirt, windshield so impenetrable it’s hard to believe the driver can see at all. The car door swings open and a woman emerges, her tangled mane of tight blond curls tamed by a lime green scarf wrangled over her hair and tied underneath her chin like a golden age movie star. She wears oversized shades as well, big black lenses in lacquered Hollywood frames. Her tattered red t-shirt and cutoff blue jeans, though, they’re pure country, lean browned limbs bent in two sickled crooks like a grasshopper’s legs before she straightens and turns her face toward us.

She lowers her sunglasses, just as Dara gasps beside me. Beneath the headscarf and blond hair, the large glasses and down-home getup, the woman appears to be our mother.

“Billy,” Dara says in a whisper.

“Don’t.” My hand slides in front of her, but she brushes past me and down the steps. The woman, still as a scarecrow, waits beside her car, the sky and distant mountains behind her a matte pane of gray against her vibrant clothing. A soft smile forms upon her achingly familiar face as we approach.

“Hi there,” she says. “You’re Marlene’s babies, aren’t you? William and Dara.” It’s only once she speaks that I’m sure it’s not Mom, not really. But this stranger’s voice, husky and damp, it looks to be spoken between our mother’s lips, and I feel Dara tense on the other side of the dulled silver car. “You must be wondering who I am.”

“Are you going to tell us?” I say, and she laughs, really throws her head back and lets it rip.

“I figured you wouldn’t remember me. What about you?” she says, and looks at my sister. “Might you have a guess?”

“No,” Dara says, but I can see her searching the woman’s face, dredging the shallows of her memory for an answer. “But you look just like our mother . . .”

“Yes. Well, I’m not surprised by that one bit. Although it sure has been a while.” With a swift blur of motion she unties the scarf and pulls it artfully from her head, a cascade of long tendrils springing out in a bottle-blond wave. “I’m your mother’s sister. Your aunt.”

“Our aunt?” I say, the words foreign to me. “Mom’s an only child.”

“Wait.” Dara chews at a split end, and she’s nodding now, only a little but it’s there all the same. “I think I do remember hearing something once about a sister. An older one.”

“Younger, thank you very much. But only by a year. The neighbors used to call us Irish twins. Not real ones like you two.” She presses a palm to the side of her skull, makes a couple of curls bounce. “My proper name is Lydia Leigh. But you can call me Aunt Lydie.”

“Aunt Lydie,” I repeat, as if commanded. It doesn’t sound as wrong as I would imagine.

“So, where’s your mother at?” She looks toward the house. “I traveled a long way to get here. She’d sure be a sight for tired eyes.” Dara and I stare at each other, then away, at the car, the road, the trees and mountains beyond.

“What is it?” Lydie says. “She not here? Don’t tell me I came all this way for nothing.”

“Our mother . . .” Dara starts, then stops and looks toward the fence and the road beyond.

“She’s missing,” I finish. “Twenty-eight days now. She works at a store at the mall, and her manager said she never came back from her lunch break. No one knows what happened to her, or where she might have gone.” That sweltering afternoon I pictured her passed out in her car, overtaken by the humidity, but her hatchback was found in the mall parking lot unoccupied.

“Dear lord.” Lydie pales and lists, her hand releasing the headscarf as she leans on the hood of the car for support. “Oh my dear sweet lord.”

Dara goes to her, puts her arm around Lydie’s shoulders and holds her firm. “Come,” my sister says, sounding sure of herself for the first time in weeks. “Let’s go inside and I’ll get you something to drink.”

As we mount the porch steps, Aunt Lydie stares over her shoulder at me, her black eyes hard like the lenses of the glasses that had obscured them. Her irises are like polished stones, like our mother’s eyes. They’re tough to look into so I turn away, toward the lawn and Lydie’s scarf as it snakes across the grass, the wind newly baleful.

The hot breeze lifts the scarf into the air before dropping it to the earth once more, where it continues to slither through the dry turf until it catches on the bottom of a fence post and coils there, dead. The screen door snaps closed behind us with a clap, just as it begins to rain.

Dusk settles over the mountains. It will soon be time for dinner, and for three, no less. Storming bad now and I head out back before it gets any darker, soaked through by the time I fetch the hatchet from the woodpile at the side of the house and make for the board-and-wire coop out back. “Shhh, don’t worry, okay,” I say, “it’s going to be okay,” the chickens screaming and kicking up pine shavings and running wild from my reaching fingers until I manage to snag one and wrestle it from its cage. I place the bird between my knees, stroke its soft brown feathers until it calms a bit; I cradle it in my arms like a tender thing and walk the green mile to the hemlock stump. Still, I can smell its fear. I stun it with the axe handle and cleave its head off, hold its jerking body up by its feet until it’s done fighting, done bleeding out. Mom used to do all this, but now it’s down to me.

By the time I’ve dried myself off and plucked and prepped the chicken, Dara and Aunt Lydie have set the table and parked themselves there over beers and a summer salad of greens from our mother’s garden. As I cook they chatter about Lydie’s cross-country trip to New York to visit an old cosmetology school friend who opened her own salon, and how Lydie had to make the detour to stop in on her only sister, her only niece and nephew, whom she’d never even met. How startled she is to see them grown, and to learn her sister has vanished.

Once we’ve had our fill, we let the weight of the meal sink us back in our seats. Aunt Lydie lights a cigarette, and I glance at my sister; Mom never lets anyone smoke in the house, but Dara appears unfazed. I was supposed to leave yesterday for college, but I decided to stay here instead. Me and Dara, we take care of each other. And in the four weeks since Mom went missing, I’ve imagined the most terrible things.

“Four weeks,” Lydie says from the head of the table. She taps the lip of her empty beer bottle against her front teeth. “I can’t believe it.”

“No trace, no nothing,” Dara says. “She just walked on out of the mall and never came back. There’s security camera footage of her heading down the road on foot in the direction of the river, but that’s all we have.”

“I still can’t believe Mom has a sister,” I say, then flinch, not meaning to say it out loud. I stand quickly to collect the dishes, avoiding Lydie’s too-familiar face, afraid of meeting her head-on.

“So, Lydie,” Dara says, all her attention on our new aunt, “tell us more about Los Angeles.”

“Oh, it’s a grand place. Just grand. The people though . . . They aren’t quite up to snuff, if you ask me. They aren’t real. Some of their parts aren’t, neither.” She huffs out a smoke-ringed laugh. “Take this one fella I was dating. He was real nice, real generous too. But what an ego! He was a general practitioner,” she says, enunciating the words with disgust. “You know doctors. They all think they poop out angel feathers. Every last one of them.”

I swallow hard and turn from the kitchen area. “I’m actually studying to be a surgeon,” I say with as much calm as I can muster. “I’m supposed to go pre-med this semester.”

“Well look at you!” Lydie smiles, her teeth stained yellow, like antique ivory buttons. “So it turns out this doctor is still married. Has a wife and family out in Pasadena. Can you imagine? And here I am, sitting there like a fool just waiting for him to make an honest woman out of me. Actors. All of them actors out there, even the ones that aren’t.”

“Really coming down now,” I say as I peer out the little window over the sink, and make a point of rattling the stack of dirty dishes against the tiled counter, turn the tap on loud to cause more of a racket, anything to disrupt her nattering. “Aunt Lydie, you should get a move on before it gets much worse. The flooding around here is brutal. I’d hate for your car to get stuck on your way out of town.”

“Billy, that’s rude.” Dara places her beer bottle down on the table. “She’s come a very long way, and had a terrible shock.”

“It’s true,” Lydie says, her head wobbling in a gyroscopic shimmy, a bobbleheaded doll. “The shock has been terrible.”

“Aunt Lydie,” Dara says, shifting closer to her, “I’d like you to stay the night with us. It would be lovely to catch up some more.”

“Oh. Oh, honey, that would be swell,” Lydie says. “Just the night, and I’m gone.”

“You can stay as long as you want. Isn’t that right, Billy?” Dara says, her face turned away. Lydie, though, she looks up at me, her stare penetrating, the electric glow of the overheads forming two crescent moons in her shark-black eyes. I feel her on my skin, trying to crawl inside my head. I turn back to the window over the sink and the darkness beyond.

“Sure.” What else am I supposed to say? I go back to doing the dishes, scraping away the remains with renewed aggression as they return to their small talking.

“Dara, honey,” Lydie says after some time, “when was the last time you washed your hair?” She reaches for my sister but stops. “It’s so beautiful, but honestly . . .”

“What, this?” Dara takes a shoot of her greasy locks in her fingers and stares at it appraisingly, as if through new eyes. “It’s been a while,” she admits.

“Well, tonight’s your lucky night. Because I am going to do it for you. I’m gonna use a deep treatment that will bring its natural rich luster to the surface, where it will really shine. Show me where your bathroom’s at, will you?”

“Okay.” Dara smiles, really smiles, something I haven’t seen in too long. “But it’s not going to be pretty.”

They rise and glide across the room. Dara disappears up the steps, while Lydie turns back for a moment, clutching the banister with the sinewy talons of a nighthawk.

“Nice to meet you, Billy,” she says, her voice sickly sweet. There’s no joy in her face, though, her expression as unreadable as her eyes of hard jet. “And thanks for letting me stay. Looks like it might rain for quite some time.”

She lengthens and continues her ascent, leaving me and the night to ourselves.

It rains for three days straight. Mostly I spend it in my musty bedroom, playing video games or thumbing through the moldering Introduction to Anatomy textbook I bought at a tag sale a few years ago, the one that first made me curious about how a person looks when he’s been opened wide for the world to see; after I showed interest, Mom made sure I got a scalpel set for Christmas, and a model skeleton for my next birthday. I’d bring home things to dissect, frogs from the pond or stillborn rabbits from my friend Barry’s hutch. The only thing my mother warned me never to mess with were the botflies that gather in black clouds around the chicken coop, particularly during an Indian summer. It’s bad luck to kill those.

Lydie and Dara shut themselves up in Dara’s room. I don’t know what they get up to exactly, except sometimes at night I can hear them both laughing behind the closed door, the only real laughter we’ve had in the house since Mom went away. I’ve stopped saying vanished, or disappeared, or went missing, because it doesn’t feel like that anymore, not to me; now it feels like she knew something bad was on its way, and took off before she had to meet it face to face.

On the third night of rain, we gather for a dinner of rice and beans. Heavy bags have swollen under Dara’s glassy eyes, dark and brown circles ringed like bird nests. Her mood is buoyant, however, almost manic, and I start to wonder if my sister is sleeping at all. “Tell us more about California, Lydie!” she shouts. “Tell us everything!” Dara claps her hands hard enough to put out the tapers, the ones in the silver candlesticks Mom got at work for next to nothing. And Aunt Lydie is happy to oblige. She’s all saucy stories and little winks and butter-scented smiles, but it’s hollow, so hollow. I want to say something is very wrong, but I don’t. I know no one wants to hear it.

Just before dawn it’s finally not raining for one goddamned minute, although it’s already hot enough in the day to bubble the paint on my bedroom wall. I head down the hallway to pee, and on my way back I notice my sister’s door is cracked open. Just beyond is her bed, three lumpy and worn mattresses piled atop a fiberboard platform. Bent at its foot is Aunt Lydie. She’s wearing a blood-red slip dress and hunched over so I can’t see her face, only the corkscrews of her near-white hair. She lifts herself into a sitting position and unfurls a black stocking on her long tanned leg, her red lacquered toenails visible through the sheer. I can’t imagine why she wants to wear stockings in this weather; even shirtless I feel the first slick of perspiration as it forms on my skin.

“Like what you see?” Aunt Lydie says, and it takes me a moment to realize she’s talking to me. She teases the second stocking up her thigh, then faces me with her same put-on smile, her same eyes of glossed black onyx, familiar but not. “I’m guessing the answer is no.”

“Where’s Dara?” I step closer to the doorway but Lydie leaps up and makes it there before me.

“Dara’s busy right now. Girl stuff.” She steps into the hall and shuts the door behind her. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“It stopped raining, at least for now. I was wondering . . .”

“Whether I was going to hit the road anytime soon?” Her smile remains, but if there was ever anything behind it that’s gone now. “It’s not that simple. Your mama has something of mine. A very special thing. And I’m going to need it to get better.”

“Are you sick?”

“Something like that.” She stretches her hands above her head; her arms tremble, they shake.

“Maybe she left it here. We can help you look for it.”

She laughs a little laugh. “You don’t understand. That’s why she went away. She knew I was coming, and she put it where I couldn’t get at it. Maybe she took it. Or maybe not.”

“What is it that’s so important to you? Or to her?”

“It’s a real piece of me. One I can’t be whole without.” She gives me a strange look. “You can’t comprehend,” she says. “It’s not a matter for men. Let alone little boys.”

“Who you calling boy?”

“You, Jack-be-nimble.” With a sharp flick of her wrist she slashes a fingernail across my left cheek. I put my hand to my face, stunned. “Play with fire and you just might find a candlestick up your ass.”

Before I can speak, she spins on her heel, scuttles back inside and eases the door shut once more, this time with a clicking of the lock.

I stagger back and down the hall to the bathroom, where I grip the edges of the sink to stare at my reflection in the mirror. My face is shocked and pale but there’s no mark, and I appear to be unmarred, as if never scratched to begin with. But I feel the wound nevertheless, just beneath my sweat-coated skin. I press the meat of my palms to my stinging eyes as I try to steady my breath.

I wait for them to show for dinner, but they never come. So I remain downstairs at the table until long past midnight, a bottle of beer warming in my hand as I listen to the rain pelt the tin roof. Eventually a door creaks open overhead, followed by the groan of wood risers as a body gradually descends the stairs, its gait awkward with the provisional unsteadiness of the infirm.

“Dara?” I squint through the gloom at the figure, and she stills at the bottom of the stairs, her nightgown pale pink and hung lifeless over her narrow frame. She’s too tall to be Aunt Lydie, but she doesn’t move like my sister, not at all.

“What? Oh, yes,” she replies, my sister’s voice after all but spoken in a scratched-vinyl rasp. “I was just going to . . .” She points toward the kitchen with a spindly arm, skin pale blue in what little diffuse moonlight manages to filter inside the room. “May I?”

“Please.” I wonder why she’s asking permission, it’s her house as much as mine.

She shuffles over to the refrigerator and reaches inside for the water pitcher, the spout of which she brings directly to her lips. Dara drinks for an interminable length of time, until the pitcher is drained and returned empty to its shelf.

“Thirsty, huh?” I chuckle lamely.

“Yes,” she says, “thirsty,” and laughs in vague imitation. Her black hair shines in the dim, but not her eyes, which are hooded and obscured as she turns toward the stairs.

“Hey.” I rise from my seat, which makes her stiffen, as if I were a wild animal she knows she can’t outrun. “Don’t you ever wonder why Mom never said anything about Aunt Lydie?”

“But she did, she did.” My sister slowly nods, and continues to do so. “She told me something once, about how you can’t ever stop what’s coming. That when it’s your time, you have to open yourself up to it and let it do its work. She said those exact words.”

“And you think she was talking about Aunt Lydie?”

“Of course, silly,” she says and gives another little chuckle, her head still nodding, nodding. “What else would she be talking about?”

“Dara . . .” I step closer and she steps back, but now I see just how skinny she is, her nightgown soaked through and clinging to her chest like a false skin. “You look like you’ve been having night sweats. Are you feeling okay?”

“Yes. Oh yes.” She smiles, her teeth gray in the moonlight. “Oh yes.”

Her wet eyes swim with glaze before she turns away again and heads up the stairs, the sound of bare feet padding against wood steadily diminishing until the only sound is the beating of the rain.

I ease the screen door closed and step onto the porch, breathe in the steaming wet smells of late summer as it continues to pour, the rain a thick curtain off the eaves and overflowing gutters just this side of the vast darkness beyond the house. A snap and a flare of light and I start: Aunt Lydie, seated beside me in one of the two Adirondack chairs. She lights a cigarette, her dark eyes trained on me.

“Lovely weather we’re having, isn’t it,” she says and smiles, but it’s not a question, just like it isn’t a smile. “Here.” She flicks her chin in the direction of the second chair. “Have a seat.”

“I’m good standing, thanks.” Looking down on her from this height I note how tiny she really is, almost roachlike, and she repulses me just the same. “Probably should get to bed, so . . .”

“You think you’re pretty clever, huh?” She ashes her cigarette with an angry jab of her finger. “Little doctor man. A real Doogie Howser MD, am I right? Night sweats. That’s a good one.” She leans forward in her seat, and her face widens, eager, its own kind of collection plate. “You don’t like me very much, do you? No, I can tell. You don’t think very much of me at all.”

I shrug, but my skin goes cold. I have no choice, I see that now. I’ve got to get her gone from here.

“You know that piece of yourself you said you were looking for,” I begin, “that one that you said our mother took with her?” I stare out into the dark night, in the direction of the main road. “If you want it so bad, why don’t you go look for her or something? It’s not here, you said it yourself.”

“You see, little boy, that’s the thing,” and she taps the tip of a sharp fingernail against her lower lip. “I’m starting to think that all I need is right here after all.” Lydie reaches for her beer, her fingers skittering over her black plastic lighter and across the arm of the chair like a spider. “Mothers and daughters, they share certain gifts. Certain secrets.”

“Like how Dara had heard of you before and I hadn’t.”

“Something like that.” She watches a spiral of smoke snake upwards in the muted light. “Besides, your mother might come back some day. And I want to be here when she does.”

“She’s not coming back,” I say, and as soon as the words come out of my mouth I know that they’re true. Our mother is never coming back. And as soon as I know this, I also know that Aunt Lydie isn’t all she says she is, and that she’s not going to leave, not ever, even if she does get what she’s come for. She’s an evil thing that’s found a dry and deep hole to move into, found a dark void in our tragic little lives that was all too primed for the filling, made her way into a place she was never meant to be. Just like the botflies do, out by the coop. After the chickens peck at each other the flies move in, lay their eggs beneath the feathers, in the scratched and broken skin.

Aunt Lydie, she’s just like those flies. She’s crawled inside our open wound, here to stay unless I do something about it, and fast. She’s a dirty little liar is what she is. I bet she’s never even been to Los Angeles.

My stomach contracts so hard that my legs buckle and I fall to my knees, the porch wood and roof tin and rainy night sky all spinning out around me. I can’t breathe, not enough air to take in, nowhere near enough. I can’t breathe. I bring a hand to my chest, open and close my mouth like a fish flopping on the floor of a boat, and in a flash she’s right beside me.

“You feel that, little Billygoat?” she whispers in my ear, and all I can do is moan in response. “That’s the pain your mama felt when she shat you out into this world, the pair of you good-for-nothings. And ever since, all the both of you have done is take. That’s probably why she ran off. Who the hell would want to stick around this dump with you two?”

“You may look like her,” I manage to get out, my eyes fixed on the porch’s scored surface. “But you’re nothing like our mother. Nothing at all.”

“But I’m the one who’s here.”

I swear I can hear her smile. “Lydie,” I say between wheezes. “Aunt Lydie, listen.”

She puts the side of her head against the floorboards, her eyes inches away from mine and peering inside me, hollowing me out. “Yes?”

“I think there’s something you should see. It’s where our mom keeps her most special things.”

“Oh yeah?” Her eyes turn to honeycombs, her lips quiver and part in pleasure.

“It’s around the side of the house, by the woodpile. I’ll show you . . .”

“Finally.” She rises and straightens, the sound of her dusting off the front of her dress before the clack-clacking of her heels as she crosses the porch. Nausea seizes me in its contracting fist, and I roll onto my side, use one of the chairs to pull myself up into something resembling a standing position.

“Well?” she says from the porch steps, her bright hair already sparkling in the rain. “You coming or not? And you better not be screwing with me.”

“Don’t worry, okay?” Lydie turns and heads down to the lawn, and I slip her plastic lighter from the arm of the chair, its deceptively insubstantial weight solid in the palm of my hand. “It’s going to be okay.”

I take the hatchet to Dara’s bedroom door, its blood-stained edge making a pulped mess of the wood around the beveled glass knob so I can reach through and open the door from the inside. I tuck the handle of the hatchet into my waistband and search the room, overturn the bed and move the dresser away from the wall before I find my sister on the floor of the closet. She’s skin and bones, her naked body sticky all over with what feels like cobwebs. As I pull away the wet strands, however, it begins to feel more like damp thread or hair. “Dara,” I say, “we’ve got to go,” and I haul her up into my arms, her eyes shocked wide and haunted, face sheened with sweat. “Listen to me. Can you hear me?”

“Something hurts,” she says, wincing. She puts a hand to her chest and coughs. “Right here, inside of me. I can feel it . . . moving.”

“I’m going to get you better. I promise. But you’re going to have to come with me.”

Dara nods a little, but then she pushes against me, tries to twist from my grasp and back toward the closet. She’s weak, though, and I pull her in close, hustle her out of the room. We head down the stairs and through the kitchen, out the front door and down the porch steps, dodging loosed chickens as we make our way to Aunt Lydie’s car. I wonder if my sister smells the meat cooking above the scent of cindering pine shavings, the savory odor of burning flesh. It’s not raining anymore, but still it threatens.

“Chickens,” Dara says in a dazed whisper, as I lay her down in the back seat. “Someone let the chickens out.”

“Looks like.” I toss the hatchet onto the passenger seat and run back inside the house for a few last things before I climb behind the wheel.

Dara stares up at me. “What about Aunt Lydie?” she asks, her lips cracked and bleeding.

“She’s going to stay here for a while,” I say, my voice pitched to soothe in my best bedside manner. “As long as she wants, like you said. She’s going to hold down the fort.”

I start the ignition just as a terrible moaning pierces the damp wet air, a deep and mournful wail that causes me to shake so violently I slam on the gas pedal before taking the car out of park. No, not mournful. Injured. Spiteful. I had hoped dissevering her head from her body, her tongue from her mouth, her limbs from her torso would have brought us some quiet. But even dismantled into pieces and locked up in the chicken coop, the entire structure doused in lighter fluid and set aflame, even that hasn’t managed to fully shut her up.

I wanted it to have been easy; instead I bit down hard on my tongue as I worked, wished myself less timid and more bold, more cruel, like her. That I could reduce her to specimen alone. But that’s not in my nature, and I know that now as well. What I don’t know is why I turned out different from Aunt Lydie, where the branches of our family tree parted and made us into two separate kinds of things. But I am different from her. And I have to believe my sister is as well. We can’t all be monsters, can we?

“That sound . . .” Dara shivers and sits up. “What’s that sound?”

“It’s only the wind, playing tricks. Close your eyes and sleep, okay? We’ll be there soon.”

We roll out into the night. The hood of the car is glossed with rain and shimmers in the starlight as we leave our home in the rearview, the bright flicker of flames from the coop burning yellow and blue as we continue down the drive. We reach the bottom of the hill, and I make the turn away from town.

“Where are we going?” Dara asks.

“In the direction of the river,” I tell her. That’s all we have to go on.

I glance at the hatchet on the passenger seat, where it sits atop my anatomy book, beside my scalpel set and surgical tools, all the things I’d hoped would bring me closer to being the person I wanted to be, the one who could make everything better. But that’s probably over now. I’ve messed where I shouldn’t have, and now I’m on call. All that’s left to do is finish the work I started.

The scalpels, those are for Dara; if Aunt Lydie left something inside of my sister, I’m going to have to cut it out of her. I’ll do the same for myself if I have to, and I touch at the invisible wound upon my cheek. Who knows how deeply she’s burrowed inside of us? And the hatchet, that’s for our mother if she abandoned us, not to mention any other bad relations we may meet along the way. There might be more of them.