Victor Lodato - Mathilda Savitch

Well, not happy exactly. I’ll just have the feeling someone’s been listening. One of the watchers maybe. Rain is the least they could give me. I’m not asking for a miracle, just a little lightning, a few cracks of thunder. Is that too much to ask?

This morning, after breakfast, I went outside to smoke a cigarette. It was from my mother’s stash, which she keeps in various hiding places around the house. Ma doesn’t smoke anymore, that’s the story we’re supposed to believe. The lie of the universe, one of many. Ma doesn’t drink either, if you want to have the whole blanket over your head.

The cigarette is extra long. I decide not to light it, Ma will smell it. It’s just as good to hold it in your hand. I haven’t actually smoked a cigarette yet but I’m going to at some point, and how you hold it is significant. My way, I’ve decided, will be to hold it between my forefinger and my thumb, like a man. When you hold it like this you have a kind of power.

The family next door, the Ryders, are having a new swimming pool put in. I don’t know what was wrong with the old one. There’s a bulldozer going, the noise is amazing. When the sun comes through the dust, it’s weird, like poison gas.

On a hill above the pool is a white gazebo. It belongs to the Ryders but they let me have a birthday party there once. When I was ten. I wore a blue dress with yellow ribbons on it. The gazebo doesn’t have any walls, just columns and a roof, and with the dust from the bulldozer blowing through it, it’s like a postcard from Ancient Greece. I hope they’re not going to knock that down too.

Kevin Ryder is by his back door watching the destruction. I go over toward the fence to make him notice me, but he doesn’t. Kevin’s brother was one of Helene’s lovers, by the way. They used to make out in the gazebo.

“Kevin!” I practically have to shout to get his attention.

We both move a little closer to the fence.

“Do you have a light?” I ask him.

He puts his hand up to his ear. I can’t hear you.

I tap the cigarette against my mouth to make him understand.

Kevin looks confused. He shakes his head. He’s wearing a big silver chain around his neck and his hair is blue. It’s a completely different person from when he was little. He also has black fingernails. But his face is still the face of a baby, even though he’s probably thirteen already. I wonder what his mother thinks of his hair. She probably fainted when she saw it. God, I’d love to make Ma faint. Just once, just to teach her a lesson. But the truth is people don’t faint as much as they used to. In the old days people fainted all the time.

Suddenly the bulldozer stops, it’s like a waterfall of silence. Kevin and I stand under the roar of it.

“You smoke?” he says. “You’re allowed to smoke?”

“Oh yeah,” I say, “just not in the house.”

Kevin nods his head, maybe he’s underestimated me.

“What did you do to your hair?” I say.

“I’m not gonna keep it,” he says.

I tell him I like it.

“I don’t know,” he says. He turns away from me and looks at the destruction again. He starts to play with the chain around his neck.

“I have to get going,” he says.

I ask him does he want to go up and hang out in the gazebo. I fake puff on my cigarette. He just stares at me.

“Come on,” I say, “like the old days.”

“I can’t,” he says, “I have homework.”

Homework? I think. A boy with blue hair should not have to do homework.

“How’s your brother?” I say.

Kevin nods his head and then looks at his boots. I wonder is he afraid of me. A lot of people are funny around us, Ma and Da and me. They don’t want to get too close to the curse of the Savitches.

I have a letter from Kevin’s brother under my bed, an e-mail he sent to my sister.

“Does he have a new girlfriend?” I say.

“You shouldn’t smoke,” Kevin says.

I fake puff on the cigarette and blow the invisible smoke in Kevin’s face.

“See you Mathilda,” he says, and then he walks away like a cowboy.

I want to fuck you , is one of the things in the letter.

Also, I am in love with you.

Isn’t language amazing? I can’t get over it. Sometimes you can just say things and it’s like a bomb that blows all your clothes off and suddenly there you are naked. I don’t know if it’s disgusting or beautiful.

The bulldozer comes back to life and when I look up at it I see there’s a man inside. I didn’t even notice him before. He’s in a little cage, like a rat or an astronaut. When I look at him he winks at me.

I turn away but I can feel his eyes still on me. Probably because I’m wearing a skirt. I throw the cigarette on the ground and crush it with my foot. I swoosh my foot back and forth three times. It’s the classic way to put out cigarettes. Watch people if you don’t believe me.

A lot of Helene’s boyfriends looked the same. They had dark hair. They were skinny but they had shoulders. Mostly tall, pale skin. They never carried books. They swaggered. You would have to say they were good-looking.

Helene wasn’t a saint. Have I given you that impression? She definitely had a body. It’s weird to think a dead person is the same person who once had a lot of desire. It’s weird because you don’t want to think too much about the bodies of dead people.

The last few months before the train she was always back from school later than usual and at night she pretty much always came home past her curfew. She had ways of sneaking in and out. She was clever. She knew how to get into bars just from wearing the right shirt and from the way she moved. The funny thing is, she still got all her homework done and passed every test at school. I think that’s why Ma and Da couldn’t say much about what she did at night, they couldn’t really prove it was hurting her. Besides, no one could ever say no to Helene. Imagine the beauty of Anna and add to that a brain.

Sexy and brainy, that’s the best combination. That was Helene for sure, and I bet Ma was like that once too. The librarian who takes off her glasses and lets down her hair. She wears a white blouse buttoned to the neck but suddenly she undoes it a little and it’s devastating. You see her in a whole new light as she makes herself comfortable on the bed. Even her voice goes deeper.

Ma and Da used to be great sleepers and so it was always me who woke up if there was a creak when Helene snuck out. One night around three in the morning she climbed into my bed. When I clicked on the lamp, I saw she was still in her dress and her face looked blurry like someone had tried to erase it. And her mouth was like the mouth of a little kid when they eat too much jelly. I asked her what was the matter and she said, nothing, go back to sleep. I kept looking at her though because I was pretty sure she wanted to tell me something. She kept staring right back at me and finally she sort of smiled and said, salagadoola mechika boola, bibbidi-bobbidi-boo , which is the magic song from Cinderella . The lyrics don’t make a whole lot of sense but for a long time it was my favorite song in the world. Helene was hugging me so tight that I didn’t think I’d be able to fall back asleep, but I did. I think the words of that song do something to you, especially late at night when you’re in bed with your sister and suddenly she loves you. Which wasn’t always the case.

Sometimes Helene seemed mad at all of us and we hadn’t even done anything. Other times it was fits of crying. She was very emotional. Her and Ma used to get into some big fights. For some reason Ma didn’t like it when Helene fell in love, which she did quite often. I guess Ma didn’t want Helene running off and ruining her life. “I’m not you,” Helene yelled at her once, and Ma yelled right back, “Yes you are!” The fighting used to scare me, but when I think of it now I’d give them both Academy Awards. In my mind the fights are like a beautiful movie I wish I could watch again. Sometimes Helene would end up crying in Ma’s arms. And every once in a while I’d catch them on the couch downstairs, whispering to each other and laughing. Half the time they’d go mute when I walked into the room. It used to drive me crazy. What did they think I was, a spy trying to get at their secrets? “Come here,” Ma would say, “sit with us,” and of course I would, but it always felt like a test. I used to try to come up with something really funny just to impress them.