She knows where it is, exactly, where it stands in the closet, propped against the wall — the clean, oiled, loaded rifle. She knows already how it feels in her small hands — exactly how long, how smooth. She knows its surprising weight.
Her grandfather once dreamed cities into being — the straight grids of streets, the safe repetition of houses — raised them out of wet ground. Now he speaks with a stutter; his walk is a stutter too. He’s had one stroke already, will have six more before he dies, so Dora’s mother says, He couldn’t have killed the ducks, but Dora remembers the heavy bodies of birds falling from the sky.
And she remembers the girl. The moon was new, a carved blade slung low at twilight, reflected in water. She wanted to dive through it, into the rippling shadows of palms, wanted to swim away from her grandfather, whose hand was hot, whose whole body smelled of the swamp. But she was more afraid of the canal: reeds to wrap ankle and wrist, mud to suck you down.
This is why her grandfather dragged her here. This is what she saw. A pale girl in dark water. Floating. Face down.
Her grandfather squeezes her hand so tight her face goes numb.
This is her proof: her own feet cut by the shells embedded in the road. Fine scars now.
A dream, Mother says. Yes, a girl did drown, but your grandfather was in a wheelchair by then, so how could he take you to the canal?
Dora can’t ask him. He doesn’t know.
She’s the only one who remembers how the water looked that night, smooth and slow, its surface tight as skin and just as fragile. How the girl’s body seemed not to have fallen. She rose. She broke the skin. She was the white scar on the black surface of memory. Whether she existed or not, she was the place you entered if you wanted to remember it all.
This part Dora doesn’t remember — she can’t, she wasn’t there. So she doesn’t know how the boy who found her in the refrigerator told nobody all day, how he hid instead under his own porch, hoping that what he’d seen wasn’t real, that he’d wake and forget. His mother stood at the door calling his name. The earth was dark, the sky still blue. The third time, her voice broke him, and the child crawled out.
He talks his way backward till he sees more at dusk than he saw in the scorched field. He knows now she’s only a girl, very white but burned red, almost blistering, her eyelids — Did he come that close? Yes, now he remembers — and her thighs streaked with dirt — no, not dirt, something dry, rust-colored, flaking off her skin.
His mother is afraid for him in a new way, not afraid as she was when she stood alone and her son was only her voice, an image in her mind, the shape of her lips in the dark — now he’s here, with her, in her arms, dirty, whole, but she’s afraid because she wonders what they’ll think when he tells them, It’s been hours. She hears herself pleading, He’s only eight years old. She wants to hide under the porch with him and wait till dawn — she’s a mother, after all — but she sees the girl, those sore eyes. She believes in grace and knows this child, like hers, might be alive.
Dora doesn’t remember how the boy led dogs and men back to the field in the now complete dark, doesn’t remember how they questioned him, how they tried to make him conjure somebody else in that field, tried to make him believe that man’s face was dark and familiar and this was the reason for his silence.
And she doesn’t remember the hands under her, the hands on her chest pumping, the mouth on her mouth breathing, doesn’t remember her body lifted to the stretcher, the white ambulance, the mask over nose and mouth, the needle jabbed in the vein and taped to the hand, doesn’t remember the long white hall or the cool metal of the scissors cutting her out of her clothes, doesn’t remember all the hands on her, where they touched and how.
Remembers only this: waking in the white room and her mother there asleep in the chair beside her, her mother opening her eyes at the same moment Dora opened hers, and in this way she thought her mother must know what had happened but won’t say now or ever what it was, will only refer to it in the future as the time Dora rode her bike too long in the sun, the time Dora passed out and nearly died in the heat — and hadn’t she been warned?
She doesn’t feel anything inside. Feels only her burned skin. She would tell her mother something if she knew where to start.
Imagine this: another boy, not the one who will find her. None of that has happened yet. This one’s no boy really and no stranger. Lewis Freyer. Like prayer, Dora thinks — when she remembers her hands on him it’s that quiet.
Estrelle, who is his mother, used to come twice a week to clean the house, and Lewis came too sometimes until Estrelle caught them: filthy, together. Now she comes every day to take care of Dora’s grandfather. She has a mother of her own at home, an old woman in a chair but not a wheelchair — they don’t have money for that — and anyway, Lewis is strong enough to lift her anywhere she needs to go. She was six feet tall, a prison guard, and now she’s only four feet long, got one wooden leg and one stump, and if there’s any sense in that Estrelle doesn’t know. Dora’s never seen her, has only heard Estrelle talk. For years Estrelle has walked to and from this house, across fields and roads, a mile and a half each way, but Estrelle’s not a young woman, you know, and lately her feet have been bothering her, swollen and a bit numb, and this is how her mother’s troubles started, so now Lewis brings her in the morning, returns for her in the afternoon.
He’s sullen. No matter how hot it is, he stays in the gold Impala. He won’t come out for iced tea or lemonade, won’t sit in the shade, won’t answer Dora when she says, You’re melting, Lewis.
He sits like a deaf man, refuses to wipe his face though the sweat trickles into ears and eyes, though the salt burns. Yes, he’s melting, but he can sit still as plaster and stare through the skinny white girl.
Dora says, You go too long without blinking, your eyes gonna dry up and fall out of your skull.
Still nothing — as if he’s forgotten how they crawled through culverts under roads, snagged their clothes on barbed wire, fell down in the field alone.
He’s a grown man, eighteen years old, so he can’t remember the weight of her small body on his, her dirty hand over his mouth. Remembers only this: Estrelle in the yard, Estrelle descending — I’m gonna beat your black skin blue — remembers that the seven-year-old girl who’s now fourteen was the reason for this and other shame.
Silent as he is, Dora persists. It’s hot. She’s bored. Nobody but Estrelle has come to the house all summer. Nobody but the skittish boy with festering skin who brings groceries and cases of wine to the back door. Nobody but the Haitian gardener with his whirring blades who carves the hedges, trims the lawn, every day. She could ride down the road, swim a hundred laps in a tiny pool while two other girls her age, her friends, lie greased and golden in the blistering sun. But she’d rather wait here, with him.
On the twelfth day, he speaks.
He says, “What the fuck do you want?”
After all her pestering, she doesn’t know. “Nothing,” she says, and for three days doesn’t go near the car. Then he’s the one to tempt her. She’s on the porch, and he gets out of the Impala, so she sees him, really, for the first time — a man, thin but hard, all long muscle, dark in the bright sun.
This Lewis, who grins, who says, “I am thirsty,” who takes the lemonade in his big hand and drinks it all in one pull, this Lewis who gives her the empty glass, leaves her mute. It’s his hands that silence her, the way they flutter like wings opening so she sees the pale undersides marked with fine dark lines. This Lewis who squints, who almost scowls, makes her feel ashamed of her small body. She hears Lily say, Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t stand in the sun. She hears Grandpa: Go get the gun. The heavy-bodied birds drop from the sky, and Max whispers, You’re dangerous, girl. It must be true, because even though she never said a word, Max, her sweetheart, her first love, was caught again.