Mayhem Read online

  I let her inspect me because it gives me the chance to inspect her back without her knowing. She’s tan, hair shiny, muscles taut, like she spends a lot of time moving around outside. She isn’t wearing a bra, and the same bird necklace Roxy has dangles from her neck, though hers still has some details: eyes, feathers, and it’s silver instead of gold. She’s so different from my mother. I thought twins were supposed to be alike, but if Roxy’s air, Elle is earth.

  “Can I carry your bag inside?” She tries to pull it from my shoulder.

  “No,” I say quickly. “Thank you.”

  A blade runs through me when I think about Lyle violating my room, buzzed, finding my journal, opening its pages. It was the only place I could be honest. And I was. I was so honest. I don’t want anyone touching what little I have that’s mine, and that’s pretty much just this bag.

  “Out of the way, Muffin.” Roxy nudges me from the passenger side. She looks weak and pale next to Elle, but even with everything that’s happened, my mother is still a knockout, as Lyle would say. All curves and heels and painted toes.

  Well.

  Not everyone is born with a pinched waist and Cupid’s-bow lips.

  “Come on.” Elle swings an arm around my shoulder like we know each other. “You hungry? You must want a shower, something to drink.”

  What I want is to push her all the way back as much as I want to let her pull me in. I try to make my body soft against her. “Yes, ma’am,” I say. “That would be lovely.”

  “Ma’am?” She lets out a loud laugh. “Oh no, no. You’re in California now. Please don’t ma’am me. I was at Woodstock, for Christ’s sake. I’m not an old lady yet.”

  “Ma’am” gets everyone’s sweet spot in Taylor, Texas. I have a lot to learn about this place. Elle seems to have moved on, though, because she’s still talking like crazy.

  “We’ve got so much to show you. The house, the garden, I mean … all of it. But first you have to meet my kiddos.”

  The kids are standing there, watching me, so still they could be wax. All around them more birds are landing, chattering like they’re at a cocktail party.

  “I don’t know if your mom told you, but I’m working on adoption. I’m hoping we can make it work with everyone living here.” Elle takes me in again. “I’m sure we will. Brayburns are all about family.”

  I flash a look at the boy.

  And then her. The older girl. Staring at me sharply.

  Elle turns her attention to the kids.

  “That’s Nevie. I call her my soft-boiled egg. All goo on the inside, but first you have to tap tap tap on that shell. Jason and Kidd are brother and sister. Jason’s almost eighteen, so in some ways it’s silly for me to go through the adoption process, but it’s important to me to keep them together. People are afraid of teenagers, but I think that’s only because kids can see through bullshit. Every revolution and social movement has started with teenagers, right?”

  While I’m contemplating that an adult has just sworn in front of a kid with impunity, I pull a Kissing Kooler from my pocket and slather my lips, because something awkward is about to happen.

  “Don’t be rude!” she calls out to the fence. “Come over here and meet Mayhem.”

  Grown-ups love to force meetings between teenagers. I let myself get scooted forward as the three of them saunter over.

  Neve comes first, the smaller one trailing behind her. I extend a hand and she takes it in hers. A jolt slips through me, like I just touched a bolt of lightning, and I say, “I’m so nervous to be here. It’s all so different. I’ve never had a friend, so maybe you can be one … for me.”

  “Neve!” Elle says, her face suddenly creased. “Let her go.”

  “Sorry,” Neve says. She pulls her hand away.

  I feel dazed. “I don’t know why I said that.”

  “It’s cool,” Neve says, with a little smirk. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  The little girl beside her holds up two of her fingers. “My name is Kidd, and I got two d’s in my name.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I promise.

  She crosses her arms in front of her chest and eyes me stonily.

  “Kiddo doesn’t talk much, but when she does we all listen.” Elle rubs the girl on the head, and Kidd smiles at her.

  “What’s up?” Jason says. “Welcome to your home, I guess.” He doesn’t offer to shake my hand or anything, so I hug myself, wishing I could evaporate, except then I wouldn’t get to see what’s inside that house, and I really, really want to.

  “I’ve told them to treat you like a sister,” Elle says. “I’m not big on discipline, and I suspect your mom isn’t either. I think kids need to be kids, explore the world, get in touch with their primal drives.” She flings her arms open. “Follow their bliss!”

  Okay, maybe I didn’t know everything about California.

  “We’ll be like the distorted Brady Bunch,” Neve says. “Not to worry, Elle.”

  “Cool,” Jason says.

  Kidd laughs.

  “This isn’t funny,” Elle says. “I expect you all to get along and for all of you to welcome Mayhem.”

  “I’m Roxy, in case anyone cares. You care, don’t you, birds? Yes, hello, friends,” my mother says to the crows, as she gathers up a couple of bags and hands me one. What’s in the car is mine. When we got to the Texas border, Roxy threw everything of hers out the window but the clothes on her back, piece by piece, howling like a loon. I wonder where Jason and Neve were when we stopped to call, if they heard Roxy hyperventilating through the phone when she told Elle we were on our way.

  I search their eyes for clues but find them opaque.

  “Nice to meet you.” Neve fidgets. “Can we?” She looks to Elle.

  “Go ahead. Thanks for waiting until Mayhem and Roxy got here, honey. It means a lot.” Elle assesses me, my blue hair and black lace choker. “You’re going to fit right in, May. Friday nights in Santa Maria are all about bonfires and beaches and all the rides on the boardwalk. When you’re ready, it’s down the road, and it’s a great place to celebrate life, to relax, and forget the rest of the world.”

  Roxy makes an ugly noise.

  “You should come with us sometime,” Neve says.

  “Yeah.” Kidd makes spooky fingers. “If you dare.”

  Neve laughs. Kidd refluffs her hair, then climbs into the van. “Later, Mayhem,” she says. “Until next time.”

  “Oh shit, I left soup on the stove.” Elle smacks her own forehead. “I’ll be right back.”

  Roxy gives her a wan smile.

  “Thanks for taking us in,” I say.

  “Thanks for coming home,” she says, and then she runs into the house.

  I’m distracted by the van door sliding shut, by the music coming on.

  The VW bus bounces down the driveway. I contemplate my situation. When I was younger, I used to lie in bed looking at the bunny-shaped water stain on the ceiling and fantasize about living in Santa Maria and having brothers and sisters. Things might still not be perfect, but they would be better, because someone besides me would know how things were and I wouldn’t have to spend so much time wondering if I was crazy. And of course, in my fantasies my father, Lucas, is here. There’s no Lyle and there never was. Every mile has erased a week of his life, so there’s nothing left and he was never born, and those same miles have closed the gap between me and my dad. My father, Lucas, is going to come around the corner of the house any moment, completely legitimately alive, with his arms so far open I won’t even have to reach for him at all. I’ll just be able to sink and he will catch me.

  “You all right, May?” Roxy asks.

  “Fine, Roxy,” I return.

  I stare up at the Gothic roof and its raven weathervane. Inside that house lives the past, my family, remnants of my father. I remind myself why I pulled over at the pay phone and made Roxy call Elle instead of going back to the shelter.

  I wanted answers.

  “Well, you may be fine, but I
need you to hold me up for this one.” Roxy threads her arm through mine and leans against me as we approach the house.

  I want to ask her again why she left Santa Maria and all of this and why she’s so freaked out about being here. But I don’t ask her any questions, because with Roxy you can’t. You can only wait. I take her arm and steady her as she negotiates her heels across clods of dirt.

  And.

  My mother is shaking so hard my arm is shaking, too.

  And.

  Watching her, I’m certain all the answers are in that house.

  FOUR

  FAMILY

  There’s weed growing on the porch in little pots along the wall. I know what it looks like from the “drugs are bad” movies they show us at school. Birds are literally everywhere. Real ones, but also depictions of them, on the pots, the pillowcases, the throws. They’re carved into the doorway and the legs of the ironwork chairs.

  “I guess the birds are a family thing?” I say.

  “The tales around here have it that my great-grandmother started feeding them one day and they never left. Brought their babies to nest and have been here for generations.”

  I glance back. The birds seem to be watching me.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Roxy says.

  We step over the threshold.

  It’s not regular old-house weird, it’s … I don’t know … hippie weird; covered in candles, incense burning, crystals of every color everywhere I look. I wander through the rooms, hungry for any evidence of who I am, where I came from, what happened to my parents, and why Roxy took me away from here and dragged me straight to hell with her.

  All I find is a lot of pictures of people I can’t identify and books about astral projection, herbs, politics, the Vietnam War, cats … stuff like that. And of course more black birds in art, on chairs and lamps. It should be too much, but it works somehow.

  Roxy plays with another cigarette but doesn’t spark it because Elle told her there’s no smoking inside. I stop at a painting of a woman with a scarred cheek. I see the traces of my cheekbones and lips, even without looking too closely.

  “That’s Julianna,” Roxy says. “Your great-great-grandmother.” She ducks down, smiling at a cat that has appeared on the stairs. “Hello, Millie,” she says, in a voice I’ve never heard before. The cat meows and then purrs loudly. She must be old, but she doesn’t look it. Her coat is a silky gray, her paws dipped white, nose a pink gemstone.

  Elle opens her arms and then claps her hands together. “Well,” she says, “look at that. Reunion.”

  “It’s my Millie,” Roxy says into the ball of fluff rubbing at her face. “Millie the Best Cat.” She scratches the cat under her chin and another patch of white appears. We were never allowed to have pets in Taylor.

  Millie presses into my calves and then sits waiting to be acknowledged. She is so soft.

  “Millie and your mother were always inseparable,” Elle says. “Millie belongs to all of us, but your mom most of all.”

  Roxy picks up the cat, and Elle walks ahead of us, skipping the creaky boards, avoiding the protruding nail, rattling on about how we’re going to be sleeping in Roxy’s old room. The kids are upstairs in the attic, which is huge and half finished, she says. They prefer to treat it like their own little apartment, and I’m welcome to go up there, too, though she’d have to move the boxes out if I wanted to move in. She says I should just let her know what I want to do.

  A bunch of kids with their own apartment sounds like some kind of heaven.

  Roxy buries her face into Millie’s fur again. “May and I stick together.”

  “Oh?” Elle says. “I just thought since they’re all teenagers, well, except for Kidd. I guess I could move all Mother’s stuff out of her sewing room. I haven’t even touched it.”

  “We’re good is what I mean,” Roxy says. “We’ll both sleep in here. I like to have May close.”

  I can’t read Elle’s look exactly, but it’s saying something. “Of course,” she says, “that makes sense.”

  She would probably think it was wrong if I told her the truth—that Roxy slept with me half the time back in Texas, that there’s an indentation in her stomach where the base of my spine fits perfectly. That’s why Lyle hates me so much and always has. He had her, he married her, but I’m the one who fits her best and I always have been, no matter how much he gave or took.

  Roxy’s old room is like passing through a time portal into 1974, the year she left. She’s told me about how everything she owned when she was little smelled like tanning oil and cherry lip balm. I catch phantom traces of coconut as I walk around, touching everything. Roxy still has her sunglasses on her head, which gives her the air of a movie star, which is her favorite. She settles on the bed and pets the cat, as though focusing on that is keeping her steady.

  Elle tells Roxy that she hasn’t touched a thing in here since Roxy left, and neither did her mother, though her mom used to come in here and sit sometimes; and of course it’s obvious by the patch of gray fur on the bed that Millie has spent plenty of time in here, waiting.

  Everything is exactly how Roxy and my dad left it. This seems important to Elle for Roxy to know, but it doesn’t matter to us right now. I want to tell Elle we slept one night at a truck stop, with lights and engines and music going all hours, people drinking and making out, and another night in one of those camping spots you can rent for four bucks.

  Elle disappears downstairs. Her soup smells like dirt-soaked toes. As soon as she’s gone, Roxy opens her bag and throws me a Twinkie.

  “I knew we would need provisions. Elle’s been on that my-body-is-my-temple crap since we could talk. We’re going to have to keep a stash of real food around here.”

  The sponge cake dissolves into my mouth.

  “She doesn’t eat meat, doesn’t eat dairy either, so prepare yourself to get healthy,” Roxy says.

  “Or to move into a 7-Eleven.”

  Roxy helps herself to some Hostess cupcakes, brown with white squiggles on top and cream filling inside, and for a bit it is quiet and good and smells like vanilla and chocolate, the only sound a loud purring.

  “We’re going to be okay now,” Roxy says, after a while.

  “You promise?”

  She snorts. “What would I do in Taylor now that I’ve left their hero in the dirt? They already thought I was a Jezebel just because I don’t live my life in a polyester robe and orthotics. But now I’ve gone and left Lyle St. James.” She laughs. “I bet he’s up to his ass crack in casseroles and church skirt.”

  We let that sit a minute, envisioning all the flower prints and nude stockings. The ladies in Taylor have a way of wrapping themselves around a man in need. My stomach lurches. Roxy runs a finger around her lips to wipe any crumbs, then searches around in her bag until she finds a jar of blue pills. Valium. Ten milligrams. Her shoulders relax as soon as she has the bottle in hand. She takes one dry, then and there, sinks into the bed, and almost instantly seems to be drifting backward. Some minutes pass in silence.

  “Did you love Lyle?” I ask. “I mean, do you?” Her pills make me uneasy, but they also open her up and peel her back. Sober, this question would produce a slammed door, a face hidden under hands, but now she looks over at me, already blurring at her edges with the promise of the relief to come.

  “I had my love. I only ever had one. Two, including you. Lyle wasn’t bad to start, and he could dance. And he protected me at first, so all I had to do was be there. He rescued me right out of the welfare office.”

  I know this story. Us, no place to live, Roxy out of gas and money, too proud to call home to ask for help. The woman at the welfare office gave Roxy Lyle’s number for a cheap place to stay, and the rest is history. He danced her into the night and into his nice house and nice car and right over to the nice altar. She said she had cried all day in that welfare office and he seemed like an angel. Said she thought we’d have to sleep in the car instead of that terrible hotel at the edge of town and
then who knows what would have become of us. I was only three. Lyle saved us. That’s the story. But I think the real story is in the reasons why she wouldn’t just call over here, where everyone loved her, where she would be safe; why she didn’t let her own family rescue her instead of some smooth-talking prick who took her freedom in the exchange. That’s a question she’s never answered, not even when she’s puttied up.

  “But true love, that’s another thing entirely.” She stretches out. “Brayburn women only ever have true love with a mate once. You remember that. Once is enough, May. Once is damn lucky.”

  This room is where my parents lived, where they had me and we became a family. This is the bed I was born in, and though I have no real memories of it, it’s familiar. I reach out and run my finger over the side of the pine crib, with its crocheted yellow blankets and stuffed animals. A surfboard hangs from the wall. It’s beat up on the bottom, blue and white and massive, and I imagine a memory of my father taking it from its hooks and slinging it under his arm, winking at me as he leaves, motioning for me to follow.

  I poke around in my mother’s closet full of clothes. Some dresses, a couple hats, some things that belonged to my dad. Old T-shirts, bowling shoes, bell-bottom jeans. I run my hands over them and smell them.

  “Well, would you look at this?” She shows me a blanket made of satin and silk. “I never thought I’d see this thing again.”

  “What is it?”

  “My mother made it for you.”

  We don’t talk about her mother, because by leaving here and never coming back, Roxy took that grandmother away from me and her mother away from herself. Instead of Grandmother Stitcher with the magic hands and hazel eyes, we got Lyle’s mother, a woman so cold she’d give you frostbite. She told me I was a bull in her china shop and then she laughed unnaturally so you could feel all her hate. She told me I didn’t sit right, or stand right, or talk right, and then she said it to her friends right in front of me, like she was apologizing for all my ways.