Our Crooked Hearts(12)
I pressed an ear to its top. Nothing. Of course, nothing. Again I turned it over. Impulsively, I touched it to my tongue.
My palms tingled with the struck vibration of a bat hitting a baseball. The metal tasted shocking, electric, alive.
I heard my mother speaking in my ear. I didn’t imagine her, I heard her, low voice tip-tapping over a crooked bundle of syllables I couldn’t quite discern. My eyes fell shut and I dropped into a memory of such startling clarity it felt like teleportation.
I smelled the wide cold fragrance of the lake at night. I saw the stars the way they look when hung over water, like they’re checking their faces in a compact mirror. The vision was as palpable as a freshly painted canvas. I could’ve reached out to smear its colors if I wanted to. Though I couldn’t turn to see her, I could feel my mother beside me, warm in the cool air.
When I opened my eyes I was sitting on the closet floor. I stared at but didn’t see the rattan front of my parents’ hamper, the frill of cobweb at its base. The gold object was inert again, whatever static charge I’d made with spit and metal fizzled out, died away.
A dream, I thought dizzily. A piece of wishful thinking, cooked with paranoia into … whatever had just happened to me.
But I didn’t really think so. It had stirred something up, something real. A memory so buried it didn’t feel like it belonged to me.
I licked its shining side again. Nothing happened. I considered keeping it, but I didn’t want to be on the hook for losing something priceless. So I returned it to the safe, for now. And as I did I saw something I’d missed, tucked into its very back.
It was a little box made of fragrant wood. A coat of arms was painted onto its top, its front read FLOR FINA. It fit familiarly into my hands, because it was mine. A cigar box I used to stash my treasures in when I was a kid. It had been lost years ago.
Not lost. Taken. Locked in a safe, in a closet wall, in a room I never entered. A stolen piece of me.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The city
Back then
I don’t remember what I was doing the first time I saw Marion. Lifting fish fingers out of the fryer, probably. Rolling quarters, short-changing some biddy in a rain bonnet because she pissed me off paying for her four-piece plate in nickels. This was when our dads were running a fried-fish shop a couple blocks off the lake.
I was waiting around for the new part-timer. My dad’s wrecked back was just then entering its final decline, and he could no longer handle fourteen-hour days. I was a snotty little brat, still my dad’s princess whenever he wanted me to be, and I’d been looking forward to putting the new hire in her place. Someone else could clean the grease traps for once. But when she walked in, all the snark died in my throat.
Marion was older, seventeen. Ears chewed up with metal, wearing this cool green jacket that was too thin for the weather. But that wasn’t why I was staring. Like a lost set of keys, like a hidden bracelet, something about this girl I’d never seen before drew me in. I could feel her standing there on the rubbed-out tile, denser and realer than anything else in the room.
She stared back. I had my dead mom’s red hair, though hers was curly and mine the sort of watery-fine that folds into points when you pile it. It was winter out but sweltering over the fryer. I was wearing a T-shirt, little freckles of grease burn climbing my arms.
“Have we ever—” she started, at the same time I said, “Do you think we’ve—”
We stopped. A charged silence we could’ve broken with laughter, but didn’t.
“I’m Marion,” she said.
“Dana.”
“Dana.” She repeated the word like it was the name of some unmapped country, still unpacking me with her pale eyes. “We’re gonna be friends.”
Redheads blush easily. You don’t need to be angry or embarrassed for it to happen, you just need to be pushed the slightest bit off center. I lifted my chin and thought of icebergs, of jumping into a cold white ocean. “You think?” I said, a little meanly.
“I know.” Her voice was quiet but strangely commanding, so earnest I could’ve died. Right then I knew she was as maladjusted as I was.
I showed her where to hang her jacket and her black shoulder bag, all the time trying to figure out what it was about her. Her body was stocky, her cheeks ruddy, her ponytail tucked under a newsboy cap. She wasn’t pretty, but there was something in her face that made you want to keep looking. She took a CD from her jacket and held it up. On its black-and-white cover a woman whipped her wet head, hair caught in a wild half-crown.
“Your dad said I could pick the music when I work,” she said. “Where’s your player?”
* * *
Fee and I grew up loving the music our dads loved. Cream, the Moody Blues, Led Zeppelin. Even the polka my dad was raised on, that they played in the Polish dance halls where his parents met. Fee and I used to spin around on bare feet while the record player oompa’ed and crackled and our dads got drunk on ferocious Ukrainian vodka, shouting us on.
The music Marion played was not that kind of music. It was jittery fistfuls of punk, working you over in ninety-second bursts. Heavy guitar rock where it was women who howled like Robert Plant, and glam stuff that glittered and cut like the shards of a colored lantern.
That first day we worked side by side without talking much, Marion picking up the repetitive rhythms of fast-food service while I soaked up the music. At closing time Fee was waiting for me on the curb, playing Tetris with her feet in the gutter. When she saw Marion her face went guarded, before softening the way it does when she’s channeling her empathy thing.