Chapter Four
The rain can make all places strange, even the place where you live.
—Ernest Hemingway, “The Porter”
Maryellen Thompkins met her father a week after the earthquake churned the valley; the day he came home from the army. Her first memory was the strength of his hands as he picked her up and hugged her to him. He held her much too tight, but he was her father and she didn’t know what she was supposed to say so she hugged him like her mother told her and he set her down.
“You’re a strong little muffin,” he said, ruffling her hair.
“My name’s Maryellen.”
“So it is.”
His eyes were a deep brown, like her own, his breath smelled like cigarettes and the whiskey that her grandfather drank.
Her father opened one of his drab canvas duffle bags and pulled out a pink silk robe with red birds and blue dragons all over it. On the left side in the front, stitched in small green letters, it said, Maryln.
“Do you like it?”
He sort of giggled and that surprised her. He was nervous, too.
When she didn’t move to take the robe, he draped it over her shoulder and ruffled her hair again. Her mother took two glasses down from the cupboard and said to Maryellen, “Why don’t you take it into the bedroom and try it on, honey? It’s late and you should be getting to bed pretty quick.”
Maryellen parted the blanket that separated the kitchen from their bedroom. Just then her mother slammed the cupboard door with a bang and screamed, “Oh God!”
Her father started at her scream and he hit Maryellen with his elbow as he jumped to help her mother. Her nose started bleeding and a couple of spots got on her pink nightie, but she moved the robe in time to save it. The blood in her nose had a funny, salty smell.
“What?” her father asked, “What is it?”
His face had paled and his eyes were strangely wild. He jerked the cupboard door open and glared inside.
Her mother leaned back against the wall with her hand to her chest and started to laugh.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was something … we have mice. It was a mouse or something, it jumped right at me. Maryellen, are you all right?”
Maryellen looked up from the linoleum floor, and the tears from the sting in her nose made everything swim in haloes from the bright bulb over the sink. Her light mother, laughing against the wall, reached out a hand to her dark father, beginning a laugh. He put his arm around her mother and held her tight to him. She remembered that she was afraid, but she didn’t want to say so.
Her mother wet a dishrag and cleaned up the little dribble of blood from her nose and her best nightie. Maryellen picked up her new robe and took it to the bedroom to try it on.
When she saw the new bed that her mother had put up and the blanket that hung between the beds, she realized that she would not be sleeping with her mother.
Maryellen listened as she undressed to the clink of ice in glasses and the low drone of this stranger that was her father talking quietly in the kitchen. Sometimes a laugh barked out, or an equally disruptive silence. She slipped the robe on over the pink nightie with the blood spots then sat on the edge of her mother’s bed listening as the low drone grew to long explosions of laughter.
Her mother laughed her tiny laugh with him and Maryellen felt for the first time that this room, that the little kitchen and even the bathroom were not hers, and she felt for the first time that she didn’t belong where she was, but she had nowhere else to go.
The laughter in the kitchen stopped. Just the occasional running of water and clink clink of the ice in their drinks broke the quiet. Maryellen lay down on her mother’s bed and was just beginning to drift off to dream when her father sat heavily and suddenly beside her, startling her awake. As he leaned down to kiss her forehead she smelled the sweet taste of whiskey on his breath, the same taste that her grandpa had when he kissed her goodnight.
“You look pretty in that robe,” he said. His strong hand stroked her hair.
“Thank you. It feels nice.”
“Were you afraid of that mouse in the cupboard? When I looked, there was nothing there.”
“No.”
She shook her head and wanted to sit up, but she didn’t want to stop his hand that brushed at her forehead and her hair.
“We have mice all the time,” she said, “but not usually in the cupboard. Usually they’re under the sink.”
His eyes were brown, like her grandfather’s, like her own. His weren’t open very wide, and the white parts around the brown center looked red and sore. Those sore eyes looked straight into her own and he asked, “Are you afraid of me?”
Maryellen glanced down at her small hands, dark, twisting her new robe into knots. She didn’t know what to tell him. No one that she’d been afraid of had ever asked her that before.
“Well,” he said, “join the club—”
He caught himself with a breathtaking reflex as he nearly fell off the edge of the bed. She recognized that giggle of his, then, because they were doing it together.
“I don’t want you to be afraid of me.”
She couldn’t think of anything to say, and she couldn’t meet his eyes yet.
“Those teeth are coming in … look.”
He fished in a shirt pocket and held out one of her front teeth in his palm.
“Your mother sent this to me, it nearly chewed its way out of the envelope.”
“I thought the tooth fairy had it. She left me a quarter.”
“Well,” he chuckled, “wasn’t it great that the tooth fairy gave it to your mom to send to me? Looks like you’ve got another one ready to go.”
He picked up her chin with one finger and wiggled a tooth with another. His finger smelled like cigarettes, too, and was kind of yellow. She pulled away.
“Why don’t you come out to the kitchen and show your mother your new robe? I’ll set out a couple of traps for those mice.”
She didn’t remember that they put her to bed, but she remembered being afraid in the dark at the thrash and cries from her mother’s bed across the hanging blanket.
“When you touch me there,” her mother said once, “I feel a glow all the way out the ends of my fingers.”
Echoes of her mother’s whispers came to her many years later, in the mountains with a boy named Eddie Reyes.
Then a snap from the kitchen popped her eyelids open, and the three of them in that tiny room held their breaths and listened to a low hoarse hiss. Then, someone or something hammered at the kitchen cabinets.
“What the hell is that?”
Her father, whom she’d just met, jumped out of bed and dazzled them all with a sudden burst of light and his nakedness. His dark body thrust aside the saddle blanket that divided the two rooms, a sheen of sweat glistening on his bare shoulders.
Her mother rustled through bedding for her nightie and her father snatched something from the top of their dresser.
The thump-thump of cabinet doors and crash of the garbage bucket continued from the kitchen, punctuated with that low hiss.
Maryellen’s eyes adjusted to the glare and her father grasped an empty beer bottle by its neck. He pushed the blanket aside and steadied himself against the doorframe as he stepped across the threshold.
Her mother missed a grab for Maryellen as she ran to the doorway behind her father. The sudden flare of the kitchen bulb illuminated a huge rat, brown and snarling, standing on its hind legs in the corner. It shook the mousetrap on its foreleg like a curse at her and at her father.
At first she thought he would throw the bottle at it. But her father dropped to both knees and snarled back at the rat. The bottle in her father’s hand thumped the linoleum twice. Then he hit the rat so hard he broke the bottle. The top half of the rat exploded with the bottle into a dark mess against the cabinet. The rest of it twitched and spilled itself slowly over the linoleum. Her mother scooped her close inside her warm robe and she heard her father throwing up beside her. Someone banged at the front door. What she remembered best was the hot softness of her mother under her robe, the now-sour smell of whiskey from the floor and the metallic taste of fear far back on her tongue.
Morning lit up the shade by the time they all got to sleep, and in her dream, Maryellen saw for the second time the girl Afriqua Lee. She remembered the lingering dream was all mixed up with her memory of the earthquake. While at the grocery store behind their house, a wall split open with a ripping sound, like someone tore a huge skirt. Sand poured through the top of the wall to cover the vegetable display. Maryellen stood in the frozen stillness that nightmares bring while the sand dissolved in blue light at the tips of her new shoes. Blue sky shone through the crack in the wall and, high overhead, a pair of green eyes framed by curly dark hair peered back at her. Those eyes seemed very frightened, very wild.
A name was called behind the girl, an older woman’s voice called her twice before the eyes disappeared and Maryellen woke with a start. The old woman called: “Afriqua! Afriqua Lee!”
What frightened Maryellen a little, and what she didn’t tell her mother about, was the handful of sand at the foot of her bed. The air around it vibrated, flapped like a pair of wings and without a sound the sand and the dream vanished in a flash of blue light.