hang up one more time I'm going home, and you're going to have to deal with your mother, who will undoubtedly remove your skin in one-inch strips when she learns you sent me away. Do you understand?”
There was no response.
I squeezed my eyes shut until I saw little orange dots. “Is she coming back?”
“Sooner than I'd like.”
“Fine. I'm in the lobby.”
“Well, lucky you.” It was a girl, no doubt about it. Boys don't learn to be that nasty until after their voices change.
“There's a bouquet here that wants to eat me,” I said. “It's already got one of my buttons.”
“Call me when it reaches your fly,” she said. But she didn't hang up.
“That's the problem. It's a button fly.”
She exhaled heavily, and I could imagine her rolling her eyes toward the ceiling, in the gesture of put-upon teenage girls everywhere. “I suppose you want to know our room number,” she said. “It's eleven.”
Number eleven was a pink stucco bungalow that squatted behind a hedge of birds of paradise that was obviously the pride and joy of a gardener who liked birds of paradise. I wondered where they'd found one. After I pressed the bell twelve or thirteen times I found myself looking at a trim little naiad of seventeen or so with the same pouty mouth that Aimee had pointed toward the camera in her yearbook pictures.
“Not bad,” she said appraisingly. “A little old, but not bad.”
She had her mother's careless, honey-colored hair, blue eyes, and the longest legs I'd ever seen, holding up a pair of creased white tennis shorts. I pressed my fingers to my temples and closed my eyes. “Wait,” I said, “it's coming to me. Your name … it begins with an A and it's got more vowels than a Hawaiian road map. It's. . it's. . Adelle.”
“Fold your map and sit on it,” she said. “Adelle’s my older sister. I'm Aurora.” She gave me something that might have passed for a smile in a lockjaw ward. “My mother's expecting you?”
“Your father calls her Mommy. How come you don't?”
“I don't know,” she said. “It's a word I can't seem to wrap my mouth around.”
“So what do you usually call her?”
“You. That is, when we're speaking.”
“As long as she's gone, let me ask you some questions.”
“Why should I?”
“Because your sister has gone thataway. Because she could be in some very deep trouble.” She didn't drop to her knees or cry out helplessly, so I said, “Where is your mother, anyway?”
“Drinking,” she said. “Me too.”
She opened the door and I stepped into a carpet so deep that I nearly stumbled. The room was furnished in rattan and tropical prints. Palm trees waved balmily at me from the upholstery. There was a definite bite of whiskey in the air.
“You started without me,” I said as she sat down on one end of a couch that looked like a great place to catch yellow fever, folded those legs, and picked up a half-full bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. Even with her legs crossed, her knees were perfect. Not a knobby patella or a skateboard scar in sight. Aurora slugged back an inch or so and handed the bottle to me, a challenge in her blue eyes. My mouth tasted like formaldehyde, so I took it. “Let's see if we can finish together,” she said as I tilted it to my lips and drank.
It was like drinking smoke. I lowered it to take a breath, feeling something hot and red and alive burrowing down through the center of my chest, like an animated floor plan of hell. You Are Here, said the sign that had been posted at my mouth.
She reached out for the bottle. “Uh-uh,” I said, pulling it away. “You can lose a hand that way.” I drank again and then handed her the bottle. She tilted it upward and made a gurgling sound. When a girl looks good with a bottle of whiskey in her mouth, it's time to be careful.
“
“What's the divine wind?” I asked, taking the bottle back and drinking. Her eyes watched the level of the whiskey as I drank. With every gulp the girl on the slab grew smaller and farther away.
“I don't know,” she said. “Those retards who flew their airplanes into the sides of aircraft carriers or whatever. They were the divine wind or something like that.” She reached out a brown hand and grasped the bottle and chugged at it. A flush came into her cheeks.
“
“Yeah,” she said, eyeing me over the mouth of the bottle, which was considerably emptier than it had been a moment ago. “What I want to know, when those guys finally got their orders and learned that they were supposed to go out and never come back, what I want to know is how come none of them ever said, ‘Are you out of your fucking
“The emperor was daddy,” I said. A wisp of pale hair hung over her brow, and I leaned forward and brushed it back. She didn't move away from me, so I sublimated the next impulse and took the bottle from her hand and drank. “It was an ancestral society. They did what daddy said they should do.”
“Hey, you,” she said, her blue eyes level. “You're talking to me like I'm an adult now. Before, you talked to me like I was a kid.”
“Before?” Before, as far as I was concerned, was the morgue.
“On the phone. Strips of skin, you talked about. Would you have said anything like that to an adult?”
“Um,” I said.
“If adults talked to each other the way they talk to kids, what do you think would happen?” She retrieved the bottle and put away a slug that would have elicited cries of admiration on skid row.
I thought about it. “The homicide rate would zoom.”
“The title of
“The neon signs at the corners,” I said, “would read DON'T WALK, STUPID.”
“Sometimes,” she said, “I think I'd like to kidnap an adult and tie him up in the cellar and talk to him like he's a kid until he dies.”
“How does anybody grow up?” I asked rhetorically.
She hoisted the whiskey and swallowed. “Don't ask me,” she said. “I haven't done it yet. Bass-that's a fish, and I learned this in biology-bass parents spend days guarding the hole where their eggs have been laid. All they care about in the whole world is guarding those eggs. They drive away anything that comes close, no matter how big it is. Even snapping turtles, the ones that could take your thumb off like macaroni. They don't even take a break to eat. For all I know, they don't go to the john.”
She took a more moderate sip. “Finally,” she continued, “after four or five days, the eggs hatch. By then the parents are ravenous. When the baby bass swim up out of the hole, their mommy and daddy eat them. Just snap them up as fast as they can. So what's the difference between bass parents and human parents?”
“I give up.”
“Bass parents eat the child all at once,” she said. “Human parents take years.”
“Some bass babies survive,” I said. “If they didn't, there wouldn't be any more bass.”
“So do some human babies,” she said. “The ones who manage to swim away before they get eaten.”
“Let's make a deal,” I said.
“What?”
“I ask you questions about your family, questions about Aimee. You answer them.”
She examined the level of the whiskey in the bottle, swinging her upper shin back and forth. It shone as if it had been polished. “Some deal,” she said. “Why don't you wait for my mother?”
“You didn't let me finish. You get to talk to me as if I were a kid and you were an adult.”
Abruptly she stopped swinging her leg and banged the bottle down onto the table. “Don't be idiotic,” she said.
“Beg pardon?” I asked.
She flicked the bottle with a fingernail and I saw her mother snapping her nail against the edges of the
