They were cursed.
They were unlucky.
They were careless.
They asked for it.
They had no choice.
They were afraid.
They were brave.
They trusted.
They were betrayed.
They suffered.
They heard a voice.
They saw a light.
II
17
THE WEEK AFTER the ice cream shop demolition, Hollis sees the girls in the bare trees near the Zilker Hillside Theater, drinking peach wine coolers and watching a shabby production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At first, Hollis thinks it’s a trick of the moon tower’s glow and the shadowy twisting oaks. But then he notices the wind has changed directions and his cedar allergies are coming on and his left ear aches, all of which are signs.
Covered in ash from the demolition, the girls look somehow leaner, taller than they’d been in life. Gone is the baby fat, thick ankles. They hoot from the trees at the Puck, who forgets his lines and whose blocking is so bad that he seems to drift around the stage like an abandoned boat. Elizabeth, a stage manager in high school, takes blocking notes, mimics their stepfather’s East Texas drawl: That there’s a piss-poor performance. From a nearby branch, her sister, Zadie, shakes her head ruefully and speaks out of the side of her mouth: A sorry-ass sight. The girls seem to sense Hollis watching them, because they crumble and smoke in the moon-tower twilight. Meredith, her brown skin and dark hair washed out with ash, takes a long swallow from a wine cooler and looks up thoughtfully at the stage. I like that fella with the horse’s head, she says. They all laugh, because that’s Meredith. A horsey girl. Meredith, kicked by a horse when she was ten. Meredith with a curving scar like a bend in a river on her abdomen from the surgery. A kidney lost.
Zadie, in a know-it-all way that seemed to embarrass the others, says, His name’s Bottom and he’s got an ass’s head. Hello?
What if we actually were our names? Elizabeth asks.
What do you think, Mare? Zadie whinnies.
Someone is watching us, Elizabeth says.
Meredith holds up an ash-smudged finger like a TV prosecutor. Or our memories of what we might have been, given a little more time.
Puck says from the stage that it’s just the mushrooms talking.
Actors, Elizabeth says, smirking.
Still, he is kind of cute, Zadie says, feeling wistful.
There is pressure in Hollis’s ear. The wind whistles through the bare limbs, stirs the ash. The moon-tower glow weighs down the sky until they are on the bottom of a vast, shallow sea. A sea that’s built its monuments of coral and shell and limestone from the death of its own body, from small and terrible sufferings that it’s kept hidden from itself.
Oh, it’s the art car guy, Meredith says in a way that makes pride and shame flicker through Hollis like heat lightning.
Elizabeth lifts her head and closes her eyes like a medium. Ah. I see now.
He’s building a monument.
A shrine, Zadie corrects. Holds up an ashy index finger.
A likeness, Meredith says, with a kind of finality.
Hollis can smell their Dolce & Gabbana perfume in the trees now (which they’ve applied liberally to cover the waffle cone smell) and feels the ache of leaving and coming home (which strikes the girls as funny, since he lives in his car) and remembers suddenly the milky smell of his mother’s dress right after she’d had her last child, who was not really his brother, how it thrilled and repulsed him.
He wants to tell them he can’t help. That even though they are on the floor of a shallow sea and greatly changed, he can’t even tell them what has happened to them or who has done it.
You have carved us on the palm of your hand, they say, one voice handing off to the next like a relay race. And he denies them three times. Until finally they spit him out onto the rocky crags of the park, his ears, two seashells, still murmuring of the sea.
18