Miss Jacobs was the pale wisp of a Cure he had seen to that day.
–No, Ada. Had Miss Jacobs lived in a different town, she would have gone unfixed.
–It’s about to rain.
A high wind came through the trees. A half mile away I could see the dust on the road shooting up a foot high. Samson said
–We’re due a storm.
I was sitting against a tree and he was lying on his shirt.
–Olivia can always tell when rain was coming.
–That right.
Cures often believed themselves a little bit magic. It got tiresome.
–From the smell in the air. Sometimes as far as two days away.
–I see.
–She used to love playing in the rain when we were little. When all the other kids would run inside.
I looked at my feet. Looked at Samson’s calves, the left one marked by one long, thin scratch that was filled with wet-dry red. It moved through his fine blonde hair with a serpentine twist.
–Anyway. She can tell you about that herself.
I stretched out my own legs. Started thinking about my walk home.
–When would I meet her?
–She’s having a baby. Didn’t I tell you?
I looked at his face, the side of it not hidden by his arm.
–No. Your sister is pregnant?
–She’ll be giving birth soon.
He sat up then, quickly, almost knocking me aside. I pulled my dress toward me while he squatted in the shade, his buttocks made pink and crimson by the brittle twig shards on the ground.
By now it was raining, though it barely made it through the mesh of the trees, landing every now and then on the hot ground with a careful tutting sound.
–So she was pregnant when Harry died?
–You can do the math as well as me.
His elbows cut their way through his vest as he pulled it back over his head.
I stood up and headed for the road.
–All right, I said. See you.
–All right. See you.
By the time I got home the sky had a hazardous, silver sheen. I stopped on the bottom step to smell the air. It had that rubbery, skidding-wheel scent that always preceded a storm. I was wet from the rain and the cool felt good to me.
Father was in the sitting room, staring at the angle between the ceiling and far wall, a mug held in one cupped hand. I said
–Thick rain coming.
This was something we always said when a strong wind came before rain.
Already I could hear the branches tossing themselves against the house and the shutters rattling in their cases. Father would most likely need to turn up his sleeves and see to the leak in the bathroom ceiling. The paint there, flaked and yellowing, garners a slippery shine in the rain. He was a strange sight in the bathroom. It’s a low-ceilinged room, and the top of his head grazed the doorframe.
But just now the storm was still cloud-bound and Father’s last swill of coffee was losing its grainy scent.
We went to the kitchen. I didn’t speak. I was tired and my eyes felt large and unruly in my head. He was talking about our next Cure, Lilia Gedeo. A woman we’d often seen to who’d be coming again soon. He was moving around the countertops, setting the hob alight with its rim of fire-blue.
–What’s wrong with her this time?
He kept his back to me. The creases in his shirt were moving like tiny, panicked worms. He was cooking something. On the floor by the table I saw our laundry in a bucket, the linens scrubbed coarse. I sat down and pulled it toward me, started rubbing them off one another, coaxing up suds. I looked up.
–Father?
He shook the pan. A smell of rust and lilac filled the room.
–Where do you go, when you go out during the day?
My dress was sticking to me now.
–Since when does it matter?
–Are you meeting a boy? A man?
–Do I ask you what you do in the woods?
–Ask whatever you like.
–I’d rather do the courteous thing and leave you be.
–I know you meet someone.
My hands quickly turning raw and pink.
I dropped the linens in the water and went outside, out back and onto The Burial Patch, where the weather would stop me hearing him. Before I closed the patio door behind me he called
–You’ve a Cure tomorrow. Olivia Claudette.
Arson Belle
No one was quite sure what they could and couldn’t do – a lot of people thought they could read minds, others thought they could see the future. All that kind of thing. I just went there and asked them to put me straight out. Always said Do whatever you need to and tell me about it later.
Once though, he gave me a look like he knew something. After I’d done something I wasn’t supposed to. I can say it now, it happened so long ago. I was a young man, didn’t know better – and we didn’t have many ways to pass the time … but a few days later I went to get fixed and he looked at me so long and hard I thought he might hit me. Usually the two of them saw to me, but that time he told Ada to go play. Told her it was too nice a day to be stuck inside.
That night Father went out hunting.
In the kitchen, come evening, he started stirring inside of his clothes.
Things were tense between us but I said
–You go on, I can finish here.
His features suddenly soft with relief, rolling his shirt off his back like it was burning him. The extra length and bend that came into his ankles and wrists always looked like it would pain him.
The arch in his hips.
His shoulders broadening apart.
If it did, he didn’t say.
When he came back in the morning he’d a cut down the length of his back. Once he straightened upright again he asked me to dab it with salt. He was too sore to sit down so I had to stand on a chair to reach the top of him.
–Good hunt?
–Yes.
–Deer?
–Yes.
I was out back when I heard Olivia come into the drive. Right away Father was calling to me.
I was standing on The Burial Patch, looking at The Ground. The rain had kept up overnight and the lawn was all grumble and churn. Things were still stiff between Father and I so we didn’t speak when I walked through the kitchen. The both of us had tracked in soil and the tiles were marked with swirls of brown.
She was in the sitting room, looking out the window. I followed her gaze and saw she’d come in Samson’s truck. I made a noise and she turned to me.
Tall, slim woman. Dark hair and pale skin. Her muscles tight and smooth inside her limbs. From the side of her face I could tell her mouth was set in a hard line but when I said her name and she turned to look at me she melted. Let her shoulders move down her back. Cocked her hip and smiled. This was something I never forgot about her. All tilts, all smiles, but in a practiced kind of way.
–Hello Mrs Claudette.
–Oh! Call me Olivia.
–You want me to look at your baby?
A hand on the bottom of her stomach, bearing the weight.
–I’ve had a pain and some bleeding.
–Heavy or light?
–Heavy at first but now mostly light.
–Why don’t you lie back on the couch.
She sat down and made to swing up her legs. I held her beneath the knees and she laughed at the effort it took between us.
–People keep telling me that laughing is bad for the baby, probably because I laugh so hard.