Future Home of the Living God(71)
Heads bow, words are muttered. Behind Eddy, my little sister, who has gone from Goth-Lolita to Overheated Preppie, is wearing a tight oxford shirt the color of Pepto-Bismol, shiny brown penny loafers, a ponytail, and tight little-boy khakis. She is looking at another map on a flip chart and using a purple marker to shade in the land parcels. Her marker squeaks on the glossy paper. A woman in an elaborately beaded hair clip makes a motion to speak. Eddy recognizes her.
“There’s been trouble.”
Eddy nods. “Most of the yellow parcels that you see are clustered around the lake, and these are ninety-nine percent lake homes. Uninhabited at present. We have used a lottery system to reclaim the property for our homeless, or tribal members living in substandard housing. We have also begun to house our returning urban relatives. As half our population lives off res, we’re set to double in this crisis. We will gain back many of our urban brothers and sisters, and enjoy the benefits of more teachers, professors, doctors, lawyers, artists, poets, and gang members. Yes, there has been trouble. We have had to take some unusual means to solve problems. We have mobilized our police force, our Ogitchidaag. We tried to conduct compassionate traditional police work.”
Eddy sighs and looks around the room.
“But some people just keep fighting our compassion, you know?”
Little Mary finishes the last bit of coloring and stands back from the map. Everyone looks at the map, quietly, the people behind me craning to see. The map is substantially purpler now and there are little gasps, murmurs. A few of the old people looking on are weeping silently with their chins thrust out. I see an older man wearing a cap that says Iraq Veteran. Tears are streaming down the lines of his face, down his neck, into the collar of his shirt.
October 28
I have pumped up the cushy blow-up mattress and made my nest on one side of Little Mary’s room. I am lying on my hip with a pillow between my legs because my back hurts. She is curled in about two acres of yellow and green crocheted afghan. I have one too. The result of Grandma’s knitting. Mary’s room is tipping back into derangement again, but she seems to have made heroic efforts to control the understory. No strata of mashed insects, soda cans, and chip bags. Just clothing. At the moment there is no place I would rather be. Though I am supposed to be moving somewhere else, probably farther north and safer. This feels like a burrow. The hills of her balled-up clothing almost feel protective.
“So.” Mary leans over the edge of her bed, looks down at me. Her eyes are completely outlined in swoops of purple eyeliner and she’s done lavender eye shadow up to her brows. The purple, she says, is a political reference to tribal clawback of treaty land. She’s still wearing the Pepto-Bismol blouse and has added a huge green bow to her ponytail.
“The baby? Are you scared?”
“I’d be crazy if I wasn’t scared.”
She nods, flops down on her stomach, folds her arms, and rests her chin on her wrists. She tells me that she’s been talking a lot to Grandma. She tells me that Grandma has hinted that we have “supernatural” blood.
“What does that even mean?”
“Maybe we’re, like, Rugaroo people. The ones who change to wolves?”
I can believe it of Little Mary with her fangy smile and blazing witch eyes. She has changed her lipstick to magenta pink—it glows in the dull light.
“Do you know if you have a boy or girl? Or twins?”
“I had an ultrasound, then more ultrasounds while I was in the hospital. They didn’t let me see the last ones, but the first one I saw. I still don’t know the gender, but I have this feeling it’s a boy. There was only one baby. Nowhere to hide another.”
Little Mary turns over in her bed, stares up at the ceiling, her hands on her little caved-in belly.
“This sucks so bad,” she said. “I wanted to have some babies, maybe, like someday.”
She turns over and looks down the edge of her bed. The dusk is deepening and the room is quickly transformed and obscured by shadows. She bites her shiny hot pink lip and frowns at me.
“Who’s the dad?”
When she says this, a wave of feeling hits. Forgiveness. Remembering. This excruciating mixture of pain and joy seems, in retrospect, happiness. I’m so eager to talk about your father. Although she hasn’t asked for details, I describe his deep soft voice, his good-natured face, warm eyes, thick black hair. I tell Mary about his capable square hands, his favorite plaid flannel shirts, about his scratched-up work boots. How much he loves real Neapolitan pizza. I show her my fake golden wedding ring. They didn’t take that from me. Little Mary listens with complete attention and doesn’t interrupt except to ask hushed grown-up questions like where he’s from and what his family is like. I stop talking at some point. The fact I don’t know whether Phil is alive or dead now catches up with me. And whether I can, truly, forgive him. My chest is so tight I can hardly breathe. The room swims around me, darker, carrying me away on a raft of exhaustion and loss.
As I am floating on that tide, something happens that may be supernatural. A presence sits on the edge of the blow-up mattress, weightless, formless, protective. It is a kind shadow. Maybe an angel. Magnetic and gentle, its love settles over me like a buoyant cape. Together, we sleep.
November 1–All Souls
Sweetie wakes me by tickling my feet with the tips of her fingers. The sun is late morning high. I’ve slept so long that most of the air has leaked from my mattress and my hip is touching through onto Mary’s floor pads of lumpy clothes. I open my eyes a crack, see Sweetie, drift sleepward. It almost hurts to feel this good. Sweetie watches me. Her joyous pixie eyes are fixed on me. She’s hardly smiling, yet her face is always on the verge of hilarity. We regard each other without speaking, an agreeable silence.