The Last Animal, page 8
“Jesus,” I said quickly. “It’s just too strange. Her getting in touch like that after all these years.”
“Mara,” she began, but I wiped the tears away on the back of my hand.
“I’m just exhausted,” I said. “I’d better hit the hay.”
I hurried from the kitchen and up the stairs.
In the morning, there was another postcard. I stood in Mom’s hallway, one sock on, the other foot bare, sorting the mail. The postcard lay beneath a layer of bills, catalogues, and fliers, so well buried that it might have been intentionally hidden. Its front showed a photograph of a pizzeria, an arty shot of the rain-spattered awning and glowing interior. I picked it up and turned it over. There, in block printing, were the words FIND ME AT AUDINO’S PIZZA. That was all. My heart set off a firework inside my chest. I recognized the handwriting from the previous postcard; I had studied it often enough to be well acquainted with those crisp, stalwart A’s.
Mom was not awake yet. For the moment, I was alone and had time to think. The sun had barely risen, though the eastern sky was humming with a blue glow. I ran for my bag, dug out the old postcard, and held it up beside the new one. They were written with the same black pen; I could still smell the sting of marker. I AM ALIVE. FIND ME AT AUDINO’S PIZZA. The second message was mysterious: Would Cynthia be there, eating pizza, until such time as I chose to arrive? Was she sleeping in the doorway? Did she have a friend there to shelter her? I sat down at the kitchen table, holding the two postcards side by side.
It was now time to involve my mother. I couldn’t face her, though. I didn’t dare to shake her out of sleep, only to wave the postcards in her face. She might kill me. I left them both on the kitchen table instead. I attached a sticky note and, after some thought, wrote only the words These came for me. Call when you can.
On the El I thought of the last time I had seen my brother. He was nineteen then, and would not go to college; he had moved to San Francisco with the money our grandmother left us to further our education. My mother sent me to California as an emissary of the civilized world. I found Jordan sitting on the stoop of a trailer with a fat red flower painted beside the door. He was wearing a swimsuit, reading a magazine, and did not notice me standing over him, out of breath, my duffel cutting into my shoulder. His hair was flecked white from the sun. There were freckles on his back the size of pebbles. Finally he glanced up at me, and he smiled all over his face. His eyes were as empty as the sky. He got to his feet, and sand showered from his legs and swimsuit. I set down my duffel and swayed from the sudden lightness. Jordan hugged me, rich with the smell of sunblock and salt. His torso was a hard knife of muscle in my arms.
But there the memory stopped—I could not now recall if we had talked for hours, if we had walked together down the sandy beach, if I had done as my mother asked and urged him to reconsider academia, or if I had envied him his freedom. I could not even precisely recall the sound of his voice anymore—was it rough, like brown sugar, or high-pitched, like a violin? These days I was left with an empty space in the shape of my brother. His absence had opened up a hole in the world, into which my own memories of him slipped and did not return. The nickname he had had for me as a toddler, the make-believe games we had once created, the kind of sandwich he ate every day for lunch, the color of his first car—one by one, over time, these things fell into the hole. Every few months I woke up and realized I had lost something else. The size of his hands. The name of that blond kid he used to bring around for dinner sometimes. His favorite kind of music. All of it gone.
At work I sat for a long time with my office door locked and the lights off. I heard footsteps in the hall, voices murmuring, but I kept still. I could almost see Mom in the kitchen, bent over the postcards, her hair still wild from the shower, her mouth open. I stared at the phone, and when it rang I leapt to answer it, but the line was dead before I’d even brought it to my ear. I forced myself to check my e-mail instead. There was an update from the giant squid mailing list, in huge red letters: The Search Continues! Another membrane had been found off the coast of Africa. This one was three feet by five feet, floating just beneath the surface, deep red and coated with pearly eggs. It had been hoisted aboard a fishing boat whose crew mistook it for evidence of a shipwreck—a sail, a tangle of clothing, a body—and they had kept it on board, in direct sunlight, so that it was rubbery and half melted by the time it was brought to shore and identified by the harbormaster. The discussion raged online: It had to be giant squids, there was no proof it was giant squids. I wanted to call my mother and hang up after one ring, but instead I signed off the computer and turned on the lights in my office.
Immediately someone rapped on the door, and I jumped halfway out of my skin. I imagined my mother in the hallway, in her bathrobe, circles under her eyes, brandishing the postcards. I peered through the little window in the door and saw my boss’s face elongated by the glass.
“Mara!” she said as I let her in. “What’s going on with Falco?”
“Pardon?”
She made an impatient gesture. “Falco. The octopus. You didn’t stay here all night again, did you?”
“Falco’s fine,” I said. “I fed him yesterday. He stole all my crabmeat.”
She stepped farther into the room, crossing her arms over her chest. She was wearing a complex green outfit that appeared to be made of several layers.
“He nearly bit someone today,” she said. “Didn’t you read the memo?”
“Octopuses don’t bite.”
She rolled her eyes. “They have beaks. That’s how they eat.”
“They bite their prey,” I said. “I’ve never been bitten. I don’t know of any divers who’ve been bitten.”
“They’re poisonous,” she said. I had the feeling she’d just learned this. She had degrees in marine biology, and I had field experience, so friendship was impossible between us. This discrepancy was common among the members of the administration and staff at the aquarium. The managers grouped together at lunch, no doubt grumbling about our stubbornness and absence of hard data, while we, the aquarists and underlings, bonded after hours at the dolphin pool to complain about our bosses’ lack of common sense.
“Why is Falco attacking people?” she insisted.
“They really don’t bite people,” I said. “They posture, like cats do. They’ll flash their beaks to scare off an intruder. Sometimes they attack with their arms.” I remembered that Falco had turned blood red at my arrival yesterday. That was unlike him.
“What about the giants off Seattle?” she asked, leaning against the doorjamb and examining her nails. “You were there for that. The reports said they were attacking divers.”
I smiled wearily. “Yes,” I said. “They tried to take my mask off. They figured out that was how I was breathing. But they didn’t bite me. They could see I was too big to be prey.”
“Mm,” she said. “So you think Falco’s just playing around?”
I hesitated. “He’s probably bored, honestly. They don’t like to stay in one place. They’re nomadic.”
“Well, we’re having a meeting,” she said, stepping back into the hall. “Read the memo.”
I went down to visit Falco. My phone had yet to ring, and I was beginning to hear a faint buzzing sound in the silence of my office, imaginary but persistent. Falco turned red again at the sight of me descending into the tank. When I reached for him, heavy black rings grew around each eye, and he anchored himself firmly to one of the plaster rocks in his tank. He did, however, send a tentacle out to search both my empty hands. As always, his touch hurt slightly—the suckers were not smooth, like a suction cup, but rather covered in hundreds of tiny feelers that gripped and penetrated my skin with their miniscule tips. I moved to stroke his mantle, but he reared up, opening his arms to make himself larger. I actually thought he might be about to squirt me with ink. Instead he darted into the hole they’d carved for him in the floor. His body disappeared, the flesh contracting into what looked like a heavy paste, with a baleful eye in it that watched me keenly.
His behavior was oddly familiar, and after a moment of floating in the chilly water, I remembered the time I had brought a hand mirror into his tank, on a whim. He had approached it cautiously, observing it with one lifted eye, then the other. He’d wrapped the curl of an arm around its handle where my fingers were, though he didn’t try to take it away from me. Slowly he lifted a second arm and passed the suckers over the surface of the mirror as though seeking to remove the image. There was a pause, during which he regarded me with unmistakable concern. He wiped the mirror again, and even raised his arm as though intending to do so a third time. But then he leapt away and poured his body wildly into his cave, and wouldn’t come out, not even for crabmeat. No one else had taken this as a sign of intelligence, though I was astounded and considered repeating the experiment, until it occurred to me that I might break his brain.
Today I had no crabmeat to tempt him out. I climbed from the tank and watched through the surface of the water until I saw two tentacles emerge, camouflaged with the muck-colored floor. I wondered what he had discovered this time to make him run.
There was a voice-mail waiting for me when I got back to my office. I flopped into the chair and took a deep breath. Mom’s voice was clouded with the chatter of the bookstore: “You brat! I brought your goddamn postcards to work with me. And now you aren’t there!” There was a silence on the line, as though she were debating whether to continue, and then the message clattered to a halt.
I called her back immediately and she answered, breathless.
“For God’s sake,” she said. “Where were you?”
“Playing with the octopuses,” I said. “Is it your lunch break?”
“No, it’s not my goddamn lunch break,” she said. “Why did you leave these things with me?”
“I brought them to work with me too,” I said.
“Shit.” She took a heavy breath. “It’s Cynthia, isn’t it? The imposition, the carelessness . . .”
“Maybe so,” I said cautiously. “But one of us should go down there anyway, right?”
She snorted. I imagined her tugging a hand through her hair, the way she always did when she was frantic, then furiously shaking off the strands that collected between her fingers.
“Let me go,” I said. “I’ll deal with it.”
“You do that,” she snapped. “I’m hiring an assassin.”
“Mom.”
“Mara, this is the end.”
I kicked my chair so that it rolled heavily across the carpet. For a moment I spun suspended in the middle of the room. “You’re sure—” I leaned over and flicked off the lights. “You’re sure it’s Cynthia? I mean, there’s no way the postcards could possibly be—? I know it’s unlikely, but—”
There was a little, breathy silence. “Oh, shut up,” she said finally. “Are you going down there?”
“Yes,” I said quickly. “Yes, I’ll go right now.”
“Mara, this can’t continue. There ought to be a law against it.” She made a tiny sob. “I mean, honestly. Haven’t we been through enough?”
“I’ll talk to her,” I said. “I’ll let you know.”
“Fuck.” Something clattered on her end of the phone. “I’m going to have to leave work.”
“Do you want to come here?”
“No,” she said. “Why did you leave these things with me?”
“Why don’t you come here?” I said. “You haven’t been here in ages. I can show you the dolphins.”
“I am not going”—there was another clatter, like a stack of books falling—“to the goddamn aquarium,” she said.
“Fine,” I shouted. We both hung up at the same time. I flipped the lights on again in my office. The fluorescents were dazzling.
I could picture my mother flying out of the bookstore, her purse unzipped, shedding scraps of notepaper and Kleenex as she flagged down a cab and slammed the car door on the hem of her skirt. In similar disarray, I fled the aquarium. First I forgot my bag, then my jacket, and then I had to run back just long enough to tell my boss I’d been taken ill. Finally I stood at the train station in a wind that was heavy with the smell of rain. Autumn had entered in full force, and the platform was scattered with wet leaves, the concrete stained red with their shapes. I caught glimpses of the lake between the buildings, a broken mass of gray and white. It never failed to trip me up, seeing that vast body of water after I’d just left Falco in his tiny pool.
I rode the train north. I found listings for two Audino’s Pizzas, but one was in the distant suburbs, the other right off the Morse stop. The sky darkened measurably outside. By the time I was making my way down the slippery steps to the street, a light rain had begun to fall. I was unfamiliar with this particular neighborhood. The sidewalk was crammed with fruit stands, pubs, and dingy convenience stores, all with awnings too faded to reveal their names. My fingers soon grew numb from the cold. I stumbled up and down the block, in too much of a fevered whirl to notice at first that I was on the wrong side of the street.
The restaurant’s interior was lit up, stadium-bright. I hovered outside for a moment, irresolute, clutching the scrap of paper on which I had scrawled the address. There was a window in the back wall that showed the kitchen—a row of gleaming pots, a metal countertop. A few hanging plants spilled over their containers and trickled like kelp toward the floor. The place was deserted. When I stepped inside, a bell jingled, and a young waiter hurried out to greet me.
“One?” he asked.
“What?”
“Lunch for one?” he repeated. He tried to hand me a shiny menu, but I waved it away.
“No, no,” I said. “I’m not here to eat. I’m looking for someone.”
The boy frowned. “Excuse me?”
“Cynthia,” I said. “Or possibly—”
I had been going to say, Or possibly Jordan, my brother. But I kept that thought firmly in my mouth. The boy glanced around the place and crinkled his pale brow.
“We’re empty, ma’am,” he said. “It’s the middle of the afternoon.”
“Yes,” I said. Beneath the waist I was all air and mist. “But you see, she told me to come here. She has long dark hair—at least, she used to have. Her name is Cynthia.”
The boy was now watching me with apprehension. “Ma’am, there’s nobody else here.”
“So I see,” I said. “Well, thank you anyway.”
The boy scurried back into the distant kitchen as though he had some urgent business there. I stepped out into the wind and felt my eyes beginning to well with hot tears. I never cried, and now, twice in one week, I was on the verge of hysteria. The drizzle had grown more intense, soaking the air with a gleaming chill, and I knew I should leave, but I could not manage it. I laid a hand on the glass of the front window, and for a moment I had the impression that I was back at the aquarium, staring into the tank of an alien species. Through the pane in the restaurant’s back wall, I saw the boy pass, his cheeks red from the sudden heat of the kitchens. He was laughing. A cook appeared beside him, ducking her head and laughing too. Her body was swathed in white, and as she hefted a silver pot, I saw a splatter of grease on one shoulder. Then she turned toward me. It was Cynthia.
My mouth opened, and one arm shot into the air, almost of its own accord. Cynthia saw me. Before I could move or plan a strategy, she had burst through the kitchen door and was hurrying across the restaurant toward me.
“Mara,” she cried, stepping into the wind. I staggered backward, and red leaves whirled about me, dusting my jacket with their gleaming folds. Cynthia brought a rush of aroma with her: spices and meat from the kitchen, and her own patchouli and incense. I saw that her hair had gone gray in funny patches, as though someone had shaken a paintbrush over her head.
“The boy said you weren’t there,” I said idiotically.
“Oh.” She laughed. “I go by a different name now. Rowan. It’s a spirit name, you know? But you can still call me Cynthia.”
“Ah,” I said.
“Come inside,” she said. “Come, come.”
I let her take me by the arm and guide me back into the restaurant, where she settled me at a table by the window.
“God, it’s amazing to see you,” she said, sinking into a chair opposite me. “I’m sure you hear this all the time, but you look just like him. Just like Jordan. Except he was blonder, of course, and your eyes—”
“I wonder,” I said quickly, “could I have something to drink?”
“Oh, of course,” she said, smacking her forehead. I watched as she hurried around the restaurant, fetching glasses and ice as though she owned the place. I had to fight the urge to get to my feet and bolt. The first time I had met her, I had formed an intense, almost visceral aversion to her. That much had not changed.
She sat down again, and I gulped the ice water she offered me.
“All right,” I said. “All right.”
Cynthia leaned her cheek on her hand. “Your hair is longer,” she said. “You know, I don’t cut mine anymore. The Chinese believe the body is”—she carved a circle in midair with her forefingers—“meant to stay whole.”
I was beginning to get a handle on the moment. It was the strangest thing to see her, as though she were radiating waves of dangerous memory. I kept catching the faint smell of seawater and sunblock.
“So, the postcards,” I said finally, setting my glass down.
“Yes!” she cried, grinning. “You got them. You figured out it was me.”
“Can I ask,” I said, “what you were thinking when you sent them?”
“Beg pardon?”
“When I first got them, I thought . . .” I found I could not say what I had thought. “You called my mother. If you wanted to see me, why didn’t you just call me, too?”
“I thought the postcards were funny,” she said uncertainly. “You know, kind of like a treasure hunt.”
Her big sea eyes were drinking me in. I took another sip of ice water.
