Florida(12)

Before they came to Fort Lauderdale’s blazing sun, they had been in Traverse City, where the older girl remembered only cherries and frozen fingers.

Before Traverse City, San Jose with its huge aloe plants and the laundromat below their apartment chugging all day.

Before San Jose, Brookline, where the little sister came to them in a tiny blanket of blue and pink stripes, a cocked hat.

Before Brookline, Phoenix, where they lived with a man who may have been the little sister’s father.

Before Phoenix, she was too small to remember. Or maybe there was nothing.



* * *



—

The morning was painfully clear. Once, at Goodwill, the mother had found a glass that she rang with a fingernail, and the glass sang in a high and perfect voice. The sunlight was like that after the storm.

There was nobody to tell them not to, so they ate grape jelly with spoons for breakfast. They watched Snow White on the VCR again.

The dog whimpered at the door. He had a little pad in the bathroom where he did his business. Melanie’s so damn lazy, their mother had muttered when she first saw the pad. What a lazy bitch. But maybe, the older sister thought, the dog just needed a little air. She got up and put his pink leash on and let him out. The dog went down the steps so fast that he pulled the leash out of her hand. He looked back at the girl, and she could see the gears turning in his head, then he sped off into the woods. She called for him, but he wouldn’t come.

She went inside and didn’t tell her sister what had happened. It wasn’t until dinner—tuna fish and crackers and cheese—that the little sister looked around and said, Where’s the dog?

The older sister shrugged and said, I think he ran off.

The little sister started crying, and both girls went outside with a bowl of water and a can of tuna and opened it and called and called for the dog. He trotted out of the forest. There were sticks in his fur and mud on his belly, but he looked happy. He wouldn’t come near the girls, only growled until they went inside and then watched them through the screen door as he gulped down his food. The older sister lunged out the door and tried to grab his leash, but he was too fast and disappeared again.

The little girl stopped crying only when her sister brought out Melanie’s cookies. Don’t you touch my damn Oreos, she’d said to them, but she wasn’t around to yell now. They ate them all.

Late at night, there was a terrible grinding sound, and the girls went outside with flashlights and looked at the air-conditioning unit and saw that a brown snake had fallen into it from the palm trees; with every turn of the blade, a millimeter more of the snake was being eaten by the fan. They watched the snake dissolve bit by bit until the skin fell all the way through and lay, empty of meat, on the ground.



* * *



—

The girls woke up sticky and hot. The air-conditioning had died sometime before dawn.

The older one thought the snake had gummed things up, but nothing was working—no lights, no water pump, no refrigerator—and then she understood that it was the generator. She went out back and kicked it. She found a hole where the gas went in and looked inside with her flashlight.

We runned out of gas, she told her sister, who was sucking her fingers again, the way she had when she was a baby.

Fix it, the little sister said, I’m so hot. But they looked and looked, and there was no more fuel. When the older sister tried to flush the toilet, it wouldn’t flush. When the cabin started to smell from the toilet and the dog’s pad, they moved back to the other cabin, where their mother’s stuff was still in the closets and on the dresser. They began going to the bathroom outside.

There was no food in their cabin, so they took everything they could find from Melanie and Smokey Joe’s. Frozen peas, which they ate like popcorn, one Hungry-Man TV dinner, which they opened and left out for the dog. A block of cheese and yellow mustard. White bread, more cheese in a spray can, a can of beans. Bourbon and cigars that smelled like a spice drawer.

In the afternoon, they put on their mother’s clothes, her makeup. They looked like tiny versions of her, both of them, though the little sister didn’t need to go in the sun to be tanned.

The older sister read everything she could to her little sister. There was one fat book, yellow and swollen, on Melanie’s nightstand. It had a man on the cover with an axe over his shoulder but no shirt. She read the cereal box she dug out of the garbage. She read the old magazines on the coffee table.

The older girl understood that there was no more water only when they were thirsty and she tried to turn on the faucet. She ignored her thirst for a long time, until her throat felt stuffed with cotton and the little girl wouldn’t stop complaining.

It was going to be dark in a half hour or so. The sun was burning at the edge of the ocean.

The older sister sighed. I think we have to walk to the pond, she said.

The little sister started to cry. But the monkeys, she said.

We’ll make lots of noise. They won’t bother us if we’re together, the older sister said, and they walked very fast, hand in hand, to the pond, and it was twilight when they got back. The girls saw a white flash in the woods, and the little one was so frightened that she dropped her bucket and spilled half her water, and she ran all the way back to the cabin, slamming the door. The older sister cried with rage and carried the buckets back by herself. Out of meanness, she wouldn’t let her little sister drink the water until she’d put it in a saucepan and set it over the charcoal grill to boil, which took a very, very long time, until the moon was fat and bright in the sky.