A man jumps from the deck to the sand. When he sees them down there he squats, smiles. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
He’s reaching for Grace, and she begins to cry. She’s still in her pink pajamas, the ones with daisies all over them. Allie wraps an arm around her and so she feels the bottoms dampen. Grace has wet herself. It’s just a party. That’s when they hear Melanie say, “Come on, Grace, it’s all right. Come on out.”
“It’s okay,” the twins whisper. “It’s Melanie.”
It’s Mother’s Day. There are no Mother’s Day gifts; David didn’t come up with anything and Audrey’s too young to have done anything on her own. They sit in the lobby, eating their free continental breakfasts. Tricia peels a bruised orange for Audrey, and then they make waffles. Audrey is fascinated by the waffle maker. She sticks her fingers into the syrupy cherry sauce. “Oh, sorry, Mommy,” she says, “not sanitary.”
David looks awful. Like his eyes are just holes punched into his face. He hasn’t even bothered to shave. “Why would you, for this grand occasion?” she says, and too late she realizes she said it aloud. But he just nods.
And that’s when she squints, blurring his features a bit. Men, for her mother, were interchangeable. She liked to have sex with them, and she liked to look at them. She liked them to look at her. But beyond that, they didn’t interest her. And so, for Tricia, her father had been a scent, a cigar, cuff links, a nice leather chair. Those men on the beach, they were bar boys or college boys, or working men in soiled shirts and Stetsons. Her father wore boots with his suit. He liked to call them his girls.
She squints at David, and sees him… tries to make him flat. Isn’t that what he’s done to her? She is nothing, he says, it’s nothing, it’s never been any good, it’s no use… For a moment, he’s a loser with a five o’clock shadow. And then he gets up for more coffee and he’s back to being David again.
“Well,” she says when he comes back, “can we go out? For crab maybe? I’d like to do that.”
When David and Tricia were first married, they lived in Austin, down the street from UT. They walked their dog to the Crown and Anchor once a week for beer and soggy fries, and she liked to sit out on the lawn and listen to the football games. She liked the roar of the crowd, which carried like voices over water down Duval Street. The announcer’s voice was masculine, rich, slow and easy, like her father’s. After the game, if they’d won, kids would drive down the roads yehawing, whooping. She reminds herself that they were innocent whoops of joy. Or probably. Or most likely. But maybe there was a fine line. Something David said to her, tonelessly, once, as he was throwing out platitudes in that dim voice he used lately, was, “There’s a fine line between love and hate.”
That wasn’t it, though, for Melanie. She didn’t hate anyone, really. Some people were beneath her, that’s all. She liked fun.
David won’t go out, and so it’s Audrey and her mommy, facing the seawall. Audrey has pineapple juice and a sunfish bib. Tricia orders king crab, and then another. She can’t remember ever feeling so hungry.
“It’s all right, it’s Melanie,” they tell Grace. There’s that windchime laugh, and Melanie’s voice, saying sweetly, “That one’s the plain one.” Then the sounds settle, as if something thick has descended on them all. Upstairs there’s moaning and sighs, and something warm and rich, a cawing, a mewing. Tricia and Allie crawl under the floorboards of the deck and look up through the slats. Grace is whimpering, and those moans, they seem to come from a creature buried for centuries, but they’re coming from Melanie. She’s straddling one of the men. Her body moves up and down, riding waves. Brandy’s there too. She looks like a boy, standing in the doorway in a man’s shirt, a pipe in her mouth. Tricia and Trina climb from under the deck and their mother looks over the man’s shoulder and smiles.
Grace is in laps, hands around and inside her, the pink pajamas in a soiled heap, flung across the deck. Tricia chews the back of her hand, then bites her tongue and tries to taste. She turns away, crawls back under. And Trina stays.
Tricia and Allie lie there, thinking. Tricia holds Allie’s hand, then puts her head against her chest, listening. Allie is still, but for her heartbeat.
Even now that she’s grown, she believes in this, that Allie heard her thoughts.
They took Allie down though. Tricia’s eyes were closed, her hands digging deep, deep into the sand, pushing deeper, to where the sand was damp. So she didn’t see it, but she knows Allie fought. She wasn’t even looking for Melanie, but Melanie was watching, Tricia knew she was watching. Allie screamed and flailed, fighting with her nails and teeth. The men were different than they were with Grace, they weren’t thick and private. They whooped and laughed. What must it have sounded like? There were still people out there, in their vacation homes. But later, in the morning, when the patrol cars came, people said they only heard a party.
Tricia never dreams of that night. Instead, she dreams of a dark room and sounds: a rooster crowing, wind chimes tinkling, men whooping, a woman moaning, giggling, tearing, screaming. Sometimes there are people there with her, in the black. Sometimes an alarm clock interrupts, and sometimes the other sounds overwhelm.
In the morning, her girls stood behind her. Melanie’s eyes were red-rimmed, and she pushed her sunglasses up her nose. The policeman spoke to them separately. “No, we were sleeping. They must have dared one another to go exploring,” Melanie told the men. “Those girls were always fascinated with that house.”
Allie’s mother, a nurse at Texas Children’s, moved away to somewhere in Virginia, and then to someplace in the Midwest, and then she moved again and again, from hospital to hospital. She felt no anger toward Melanie. She wrote letters, asking again and again what the girls did that day. And Melanie sang her the songs they sang, told her about the virgin daiquiris she made them. “I feel close to you, Melanie,” Allie’s mother said.
“I know. I do too. I know how lucky I am. I’m surprised you don’t hate me, with my two still here.”
“I don’t have many girlfriends,” Melanie said to her twins when she hung up. “I’m glad she feels she can talk to me.”
After a while the phone calls stopped. Allie’s mom never came back to Texas.
On that drive back, they returned early. The sky was damp and close. It was the kind of muggy Houston weather that felt as wet as rain, but the rain wouldn’t come.
“The clouds look like smashed brains,” Tricia said.
“It’s a hard day, I know, kittens,” Melanie said. She turned on the radio and rolled the windows down. She sniffled, wiping her nose with her wrist, and lit a cigarette. In that moment, Tricia believed her mother was as close to sad as she could ever be.
She and Trina weren’t really twins, after that.
Someday, when David is gone-and he will be gone, Tricia is sure of that now-she’ll bring Audrey back to the beach. They’ll buy matching skull shirts on the Strand and have their pictures taken together in a booth. They’ll come here in the winter and search for sand dollars, and dip their ankles into the surf. It’s not so crowded in the wintertime. Tricia will raise her hand up to the sky and sprinkle the shimmers all over the water, just as her mother used to do. She’ll laugh and tickle her black-haired daughter. “I come from a long line of witches,” she’ll say. “My grandmother was a witch, and her daughter was a witch, and I am a witch, and you!” She’ll jab Audrey in the ribs until she giggles. “But not for real. Just for pretend.”
“That’s right,” Tricia will cackle, “we’re good witches. And just for pretend.”
What she remembers that day as they drive back, David silent as she points out the freighters and the gulls to Audrey, what she remembers on that very bright day is how, after the men had gone away in their trucks, her mother carried the naked bodies out into the sea.
It wasn’t ceremonious; it wasn’t unkind either. The bodies looked like bodies, not Allie, not Grace. Legs and arms and necks in the moonlight. They were lovely the way a wet, dead fish shining in the dark is lustrous before it splits open and begins to rot.
WHO STOLE MY MONKEY? by DAVID CORBETT & LUIS ALBERTO URREA
