Florida(11)

—

The big sister said, Once upon a time, there was a—

—princess, the little sister said.

Rabbit, the big sister said.

Rabbit princess, the little sister said.

Once upon a time, there was a tiny purple rabbit, the older sister said. A man saw her and scooped her up in his net. Her family tried to stop him, but they couldn’t. The man went into the city and took the rabbit to a pet store and put her into a box in the window. All day long people stuck their hands in to touch the purple rabbit. Finally, a girl came in and bought the rabbit and took her home. It was better there, but the rabbit still missed her family. She grew and slept with the girl in her bed, but most days she stared out the window all sad. She began to forget that she was a rabbit. One day, the girl put a leash on the rabbit and they went out into the park. The rabbit looked up and saw another rabbit staring at her from the edge of the woods. They looked at each other long enough for her to remember that she was not a girl but a rabbit, and the other rabbit was her own sister. The girl was kind to her and gave her food, but the rabbit looked at her sister and she knew that this was her only chance. She slipped out of the collar and ran as fast as she could over the field, and she and her sister hopped into the forest. The rabbit family was so happy to see her. They had a party, dancing and singing and eating cabbage and carrots. The end.

The little sister was asleep. The two fishing cabins rocked on their stilts, the dock ground against the shore, the wind spoke through the cracks in the window frames, the palms lashed, the waves shattered and roared. The older girl held her little sister.

All night, she and the island were awake, the island because it never slept, the girl because she knew that only her ferocious attention would keep them safe.



* * *



—

Before they were left alone in the fishing camp on the island in the middle of the ocean, there had been Smokey Joe and Melanie. They were strangers to the girls. He wore a red bandanna above his eyebrows. Her shirts couldn’t hold in all her flesh.

The older girl knew that the two adults were nervous, because they didn’t stop smoking and arguing in hushed voices while the girls watched Snow White over and over. It was the only tape they’d brought. In the afternoon, Smokey Joe took the girls on a walk to the pond at the center of the island. It was a weird place. Beyond the sandy bay where the dock and the cabin were, the land grew rough with a kind of spongy stone and the trees seemed shrunken and bent by the wind.

Watch out, he told them. A Hollywood movie had been made here a long time ago and some monkeys had escaped. You come close, they’ll rip your hair out and steal your food from your bowl and throw poop at your head. He was joking, maybe. It was hard to tell.

They didn’t see any monkeys, though they did see huge black palmetto bugs, a rat snake sunning itself on the sandy path, long-necked white birds that Smokey Joe called ibises.

In the cabin, Melanie gave them hamburger patties without ketchup or buns and told them not to touch the dog because he was a mean little sucker. The younger sister didn’t listen, and suddenly her forearm was bleeding. Melanie shrugged and said, Told you. The older girl got one of their mother’s maxi pads from her dopp kit and wrapped it, sticker side out, around her sister’s arm.

Smokey Joe sat outside all afternoon under the purple tree with its nubby green banana fingers. He was listening to his CB radio. Then he stood up and shouted for Melanie. Melanie ran out, her breasts and belly moving in all kinds of directions under her shirt. The older sister heard Smokey Joe say, Safer to leave ’em.

Melanie poked her head into the cabin. She was pale under her orangey tan.

She said, Stay here. If someone shows up, don’t you go with no man. Girls, listen to me. Stay here, be good. I’ll send a lady to get you in a few hours.

The girls went outside and watched Smokey Joe and Melanie running down the dock. Melanie was screaming for the dog, but the dog stood still and didn’t follow her. And then Joe threw off the lines and Melanie jumped into the boat, almost missing it. One leg dangled in the water, then she lifted it over the side and they took off at full speed.

Before that, exactly one day before Smokey Joe and Melanie left the girls alone on the island, their mother had come to them in their own cabin, and she was dressed all fancy and smelled like a garden. Her boyfriend Ernesto and she were going out in Ernesto’s boat, she said. We’ll only be gone for an hour or two, honey bears. She pressed them close to her, her face made up with blue eyeshadow, her eyelashes so thick and long that it was a wonder she could see. She left red kisses on their cheeks.

But the hours clicked by and she didn’t come back at all. When night fell, the girls had to sleep on the floor in Melanie and Smokey Joe’s cabin, and Melanie and Smokey Joe whispered behind their bedroom door all night.

And, two days before that, their mother had come into the girls’ room in Fort Lauderdale in the middle of the night and thrown a few of their things into a bag and said, We’re going on a boat ride, pretties! Ernesto’s going to make us rich, and she laughed. Their mother was so beautiful she just glinted off light. Before the sun was even up, they were on Ernesto’s boat, going fast through the dark. And then they’d come to this little island, and the adults had talked all day and all night in the other cabin, and their mother had seemed wild on the inside, flushed on the outside.

And before Ernesto, many nights before him, their mother would come home very late, jangling. She usually made dinner for the girls, then left the older girl in charge of getting her sister’s teeth brushed and reading her to sleep. The older girl never slept in her own bed, always just stayed beside her sister until their mother was home. Sometimes, when the mother came in, she would get the girls up in their nightgowns, the night still in the windows, and sprinklers spitting in the courtyard, and she’d smell of vodka and smoke and money, and would put music on too loud and they’d all dance. Their mother would smoke cigarettes and fry up eggs and pancakes that she’d top with strawberry ice cream. She’d talk about the other women she worked with: idiots, she called them. Skanks. She didn’t trust other women. They were all backstabbing bitches who’d rob you sooner than help you. She liked men. Men were easy. You knew where you were with men. Women were too complicated. You always had to guess. You couldn’t give them an inch or they’d ruin you, she said.