Life Sentences (13 page)

She searched his face. It was
bullshit. He knew it. She knew it. She closed her eyes and gave him a lingering
kiss, then drew abruptly back. "I'm sorry," she said, looking almost
as startled as he was, her eyes shiny bright with tears.

"It's okay," he said.

"No, I shouldn't have done
that."

"We're not supposed to fraternize."

There was a delicate, haunted
look about her. He was puzzled by her behavior, by her inability to define
her boundaries. He recognized the wide-open vulnerability of a damaged
psyche, but that only made him want to protect her more. "Don't worry
about it," he said gently.

"No, seriously. I shouldn't
have done that." She rubbed her tired face as if she wanted to rearrange
her features. "I'm just scared. I don't want to be alone."

"I promise I will find your
sister," he said, heading for the door. "One thing about me, I
am unrelenting."

Daisy lay in bed, feeling sluggish
and out of breath. Completely flat. She buried her face in the motel
pillow, wanting to fall into a dreamless sleep, since only in sleep did
the possibility of Anna still exist. She recalled her sister's
snorty
laughter, the funny words she used to invent, like
cargoyle
for an ugly car, or
eu-five-ia
(which came after
euphoria
), and
she wanted to laugh. Her body grew tangled with emotion as she recalled
her sister's violent mood swings, the way she'd get mad and throw things at
the TV whenever
The Brady Bunch
theme
song came on. When they were little, Anna used to ask her all J the time
why the sky was blue. It was a question that obsessed her. She wouldn't
let go. "Why's the sky blue, Daisy? Why not red or green?" And Daisy,
who didn't have a clue back then, would say, "Because." Just
"Because." Now that she knew why the sky was blue, Anna wasn't there
to ask her anymore.

The sky was blue because the sun's
light waves interacted with the earth's atmosphere in such a way as to
scatter the white light. Since blue wavelengths were the shortest of all
wavelengths, a larger portion of them got scattered. Bouncing off air
particles, they became visible to the naked eye. "The sky is blue
because of the rejected wavelengths, Anna."

But if her sister were there today,
she would've said, "I think 'Because' is a better answer."

The heat was unrelenting. Daisy
told her body to move, but it refused to obey her brain. She was extremely
bothered by this lack of response from her body. She lay there with her
tongue exploring the inside of her cheek and scowled at the furniture,
her anger twisting around inside of her. She hated herself for being so
naive. The world was a dangerous place. She used to think that everything
would be okay, but that was a joke. Life was a joke. It was funny what we thought
was true. For instance, there was a time long ago when the scientific
community believed that the atom was an impenetrable sphere, like a
ball bearing. Now they knew it to be composed of moving parts-ions, neutrons,
electrons. Daisy wondered what else people "knew for a fact"
that would later be proved false and antiquated.

She stared at the motel walls, wanting
to obliterate her grief. With an enormous burst of energy, she got out
of bed, crossed the room and emptied out the
minibar
.
Then she crawled back into bed and drained the little liquor bottles one
by one. The combination of drinks tasted like turpentine going down.
A fly buzzed lethargically past her head. Back in Vermont, during the
summertime, troops of carpenter ants and stray flies would mysteriously
find their way into the house, and Lily would become obsessed with killing
them. She set traps for the ants and would run around the kitchen with a
plastic fly-swatter and a can of Raid, smashing the flies against the white
walls. The girls would snicker while their mother folded the morning paper
in half and swatted any fly that landed on the breakfast table, then wiped
up the remains with a paper napkin. "
Eww
!
Gross!" The girls would keep score. Mom 3, Flies 0.

Daisy swallowed the dregs of the
last bottle like medicine, then pulled the covers over her head and closed
her eyes.

From the very first day that Orson
Barsum moved into the house, he attempted to father the Hubbard girls.
To love them. To nurture them. They could see it in his eyes, this repressed
tenderness that went beyond a sense of duty or obligation. Louis called
him
Da-Da
, but the girls called him Mr. Barsum. He
was a big-boned, gentle man with solemn eyes and a five o'clock shadow,
and there was always an olive-drab aura about him. After he'd finally ruined
everything and had left Edgewater in shame and dishonor, Daisy's mother
had told her, "You can never reap the rewards of love unless you accept
all the pain and rejection and loss that go along with it."

When Louis was two years old, he
began to develop many ticks that wouldn't go away. He underwent several
operations and had to stay for weeks at a time at Children's Hospital
in Boston. When he came home from his trips to the pediatrics ward, he
was bald. "There are no words to describe what I'm feeling,"
Lily told Daisy at the time. "I am simply heartbroken."

Eight-year-old Daisy loved her little
brother more than she loved anybody else in the whole wide world. Louis
Hubbard believed in everything-the Easter Bunny, Tinker Bell, the Cookie
Monster. He had a great big undiscriminating heart and loved party
balloons and brightly colored toys and would listen to any kind of music.
He had a cavernous laugh and would pat any dog or cat that came within
range of his stroller.

It was Mr. Barsum who first discovered
Louis's childhood illness. It happened the year after he had moved
in. One night they all woke up to a terrifying sound-a low rumble that
vibrated the beds and rattled the plastic beads on Daisy's bedside table.
She sat up searching for her sister's shadow across the room.
"Anna?"

"I heard it."

"What was that? Thunder?"

"More like an earthquake,"
Anna said dramatically.

Daisy dug her hands between her
knees to keep from shivering to death as the rumbling grew louder and
the whole house shuddered before finally settling back into stillness.
Outside her window, everything was black. "Mom?" she called.
"Mom?"

Their mother opened the door.
"Girls? You okay?"

"What was that?" they asked
in unison.

"The dam broke. That was the
lake whooshing away."

"What dam?" Anna said angrily,
as if she should've been informed of it earlier.

Lily swept into the room, smelling
of mango perfume and coconut hand lotion, then floated past Daisy toward
Anna's bed. Elusive as a butterfly.

"Will the lake come here?"
Anna asked as their mother sat down beside her.

"No, honey. We're on high ground,"
Lily said. "It's the people who live below us in the valley who
might have problems."

"I'm scared," Daisy whispered.
"Mom?"

Her mother crossed the room and
sat on the edge of her bed. She smoothed the hair away from Daisy's face
with the gentlest of touches. They lived out in the boondocks, surrounded
by rolling green hills and woods and cornfields and farms, and the lake
down the hill had campsites and docks for boating and fishing, and every
Saturday, Mr. Barsum would take the girls rowing on Mohawk Lake. They'd
wear their soggy tangerine-colored life jackets, and Daisy would rake
her hands in the cold black water while Mr. Barsum fished off the bow or else
rowed them around. The girls would shade their eyes and search for fish
in the water-schools of sunfish or trout that reminded her of sleek
strands of seaweed caught on fishhooks. Sometimes Mr. Barsum would
row them out to the island in the middle of the lake, where the painted
turtles sat sunning themselves on the flat rocks and the black king snakes
lay coiled in the grass like warm inner tubes. Frog eggs floated in the water
near the shore, along with paper cups, which Mr. Barsum would dutifully
scoop out of the lake, practically tipping the boat and making the
girls squeal. "Why do people do this?" he'd say, collecting
trash at the bottom of the rowboat. "We live in a throwaway society,
girls."

"What about Hickory Street?"
Anna asked now. She was sitting up in bed and had her sunglasses on. She
kept her sunglasses on her bedside table, right next to her headless
Barbie. "
Maranda
lives on Hickory Street!"

"I'm sure
Maranda's
fine," their mother said.

Maranda
was Anna's best friend, a plump little girl with a wide face and turnip-yellow
hair.

The radio was on in their mother's
bedroom across the hall, and through the open doorway, Daisy could see
Mr.
Barsum's
shadow on the wall-his silhouette
and the rounded back of his favorite chair. Far away, sirens were whining.
Their mother wore a long nightgown, and the ribbons at her throat were
the same color as the tiny red hearts all over the flannel fabric. Daisy
reached out to touch her mother's arm, which was the softest thing she
knew.

"The dam broke," Lily explained,
"and all the water rushed down into the valley. We're lucky it happened
in the middle of the night when nobody was swimming in it." She shuddered,
probably thinking about her girls getting sucked away. She parted the gauzy
curtains and looked out at the blackness.

"Can we get up?" Daisy asked.

"No, sweetie." Lily tested
her forehead for a fever, and Daisy reached for her mother's palm,
which felt rougher than the skin of her arm but softer than a callus.

Anna had one foot on the floor.
"Hey, Mom?"

"Get back in bed."

Anna tucked her leg back up.

Across the hallway from them, the
radio was droning, while outside, the birds were singing like it was
the middle of the day. Two owls made separate songs, and a moth brushed
up against the window screen, pressing its whiteness to the wire mesh in
an attempt to get closer to the hallway light. In the woods outside their
house, a thousand summer leaves rustled in the wind.

Anna was crying now-her cries were
always the same, soft and wheezy, like an allergy. Sometimes she swallowed
air and got the hiccups.

"Lily?" Mr. Barsum said.
He was standing in the doorway in his boxer shorts and nothing else, and
Daisy bet a million bucks his feet smelled. "There's something
wrong with Louis," he said.

Lily bolted out of the girls' room,
and Daisy stared at her sister, who was standing on her bed with a frightened
look on her face.

"Get back in bed," Daisy
said.

"I am in bed, stupid."

"Lie down,
numbnuts
!"

Two shadows stirred the light outside
their door while the thread of the announcer's voice unraveled from
the radio. "Louis? Louis?" their mother whispered harshly.

Daisy kicked her covers off and
hopped out of bed.

"Don't," Anna hissed.
"You'll get into trouble."

"Shut up, pip-squeak."
Breathing softly through her open mouth, Daisy tiptoed across the room
and stood in the doorway, fear spreading in little ripples down her
legs. Her mother's gasps were songlike, all part of a single breath.
The bedroom across the dark hall was full of light, and Lily and Mr. Barsum
were bent over the baby's crib, their backs toward her, and all she could
see was Mr.
Barsum's
jerking shoulders. A strange
sound came from his lungs, like an engine that wouldn't start.
Sputter, sputter
. "What should
we do?" he gasped.

Her mother's hand wandered into
Mr.
Barsum's
hair, over his ears and down the back
of his neck, the same way it wandered over Daisy's and Anna's heads whenever
they needed comforting.

A bitter taste filled Daisy's mouth.
She was afraid to move. It felt as if everything were suddenly busting
up right in front of her; as if they were all cracking apart and falling to
pieces. Mr.
Barsum's
shoulders heaved, and she
watched the top of his head with all his thick dark hair bouncing up and
down as he sobbed. She'd never seen him cry like that before, and she hated
his guts worse than ever.

That night, they whisked Louis
away to the hospital, just like the lake had been whisked away. Daisy
felt a lethal ache around her heart, scared that her brother might be dead,
only nobody would tell her about it. The following morning, while their
mother was at the hospital, Mr. Barsum took the girls down to the lake,
where they kept their rowboat tied to the dock.

At first, the trees were too thick
to see through, but as they took jogging steps downhill, the trees began
to thin out and Daisy could see that the lake was empty. Flushed. As they
stood on the piney shore, she couldn't believe it-the lake was gone.

"Wow," Mr. Barsum said,
scooping Anna up in his arms. "Would you look at that?"

"Is Louis okay?" Daisy
asked him.

"He'll be fine. You'll
see."

She knew he was lying. She wondered
how he could be so strong and so weak at the same time.

"Will you look at that?"
He whistled. "What a sight."

The wharf extended out into nothing.
The drop was deep into water-speckled mud, and the dock's legs were black
and hairy and covered in slime. Small fish splashed around in the shallow
pockets of water, and way out in the middle of the lake, blue sky reflected
off the remaining puzzle pieces. On the opposite shore, saplings shot
up from the banks, their lime-green limbs bending over muddy drops. Plenty
of litter mucked the lake bottom-tar-colored fishing poles and bright
plastic buckets, half-buried flip-flops and boards with the nails sticking
out, the red rust like crusted ketchup.

"Holy cow," Mr. Barsum said,
taking in the view.

"It's all splashed out like a
big bathtub," Anna lisped. She didn't actually have a lisp, but
she liked to pretend she did for certain grown-ups. "
Maranda's
family had to wait up on the roof for the
rescue boat," she said, playing with Mr.
Barsum's
hair.

He tested the wharf by jiggling it
with his foot, then walked the girls out to the very end. From the muddy bottom
came a strong smell. Dead fish floated belly-up in the puddles while live
fish twitched their fins and snapped their snouts, trying to wriggle into
the deeper pools of water.

"Poor fish!" Daisy cried.

"Yuck!" said Anna.

Daisy remembered how scared she
used to be of the cold, dark lake bottom; but now that it was empty, she could
see that this was all there was-mud and goop and limp plant life and everybody's
dropped things. She'd never be afraid of it again.

"Should we go investigate,
girls?" Without waiting for an answer, Mr. Barsum set Anna down on
the wharf, his hand brushing her backside as he released her.

"
Yay
!"
she said, hurrying back to Daisy, her yellow sundress catching the
light in between breaks in the clouds.

Daisy took her sister's hand, and
together they climbed down onto the lake bottom, where the mudflats bore
their weight like sandbars at the beach.

"Hey, look. Somebody's
shoe." Mr. Barsum picked up a lady's white high heel. Next to it was a
dead fish with blackened gills that smelled rotten in the strong sun.
"We pollute our water, we pollute our air. Pretty soon they'll have
to bottle the air and sell it. Maybe I should get in on the ground floor,
huh? We could make a million bucks."

The girls had to struggle just to
keep up with him, he was going so fast. More than once, they found themselves
surrounded by knee-deep pools of water, where fish the size of Daisy's
hand skittered and darted in all directions at the exact same instant
together.

"What kind of fish are those?"
Anna lisped.

"Sun."

"Huh?"

"Sawfish," Daisy said.
"Well… maybe they're bluegills."

Anna made a sour face as if it
didn't matter what they were called.

Mr. Barsum was moving away from
them fast, striding across the lake as if he were crossing a big floor,
his work boots coated with mud.

"Mr. Barsum!" Anna hollered.
"You're going too fast!"

He stopped long enough to scoop
her up in his arms, and Anna flashed a superior smile back at Daisy, who
kept hopping from dry spot to dry spot, falling further and further behind.
Her mother was at the hospital. She felt enormously sad. What would happen
to Louis? They were heading for the vast middle of the lake. Daisy glanced
back at the shore, the wharf very far away now.

"Mr. Barsum?" she cried.
"Should we be out this far?"

"We can do whatever we like."
He smiled at her. "C'mon,
Upsy
-Daisy. Where's
your sense of adventure?"

Anna squirmed in his arms, but he
held on tight and continued moving swiftly toward Turtle Island. He took
long strides, and Daisy had to jump from mudflat to mudflat in order to
keep up. The mud was reluctant to let go of her feet, and soon one of her
sneakers slogged off, but Mr. Barsum still wouldn't slow down. He was on a
mission. Walking through the mud was like pulling on and off a pair of
winter boots, over and over again. Sunlight glittered on deep pools of
water where the fish swam around like bugs inside a windowless room.
Daisy could just make out their shadows in that underwater world.