Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

Aria at twelve: she walked fast under the bridge with her hands in her pockets, a sheen of black hair falling to her waist, dressed in one of her father’s shirts with the sleeves rolled up, wearing pants a few sizes too big that had been left behind by a cousin on the other side, the Ecuadoran side that used to come up for long contentious visits before her mother was deported, and Anton’s mother murmured in his ear as Aria approached, “Be nice to your cousin, she’s having a rough time of it.” But the departure of Aria’s mother hadn’t changed her. Except for her clothes, except for her general air of neglect and the way she winced at even a passing reference to her mother, she retained an inner core unchanged from the one Anton had always known. She was infinitely confident. She was an expert thief. She shoplifted candy, bags of chips, fashion magazines. She wasn’t kind and she tolerated nothing, but she was capable of friendliness. She exuded courage and malice in equal parts.

Anton was eleven. Aria was only six months older, but there were times when the space between them felt like years. He sat with his mother on the loading dock with a mug of coffee in his hands, watching his cousin approaching from the other side of the bridge.

“Ari,” his mother said, in greeting.

“Hi.” Aria ascended the loading-dock stairs, reached into her pocket and gave Anton a chocolate bar. He took it, knew it was stolen and was swept through with resentful admiration. He knew she didn’t give him chocolate bars because she liked him; she gave him chocolate bars to remind him that he was too chicken to steal his own.

“Did you walk here alone?” Anton’s mother asked.

Of course she had walked there alone. She lived a mile away, in a deeper part of Brooklyn that was less pleasant, farther from Manhattan, where the apartments were cheaper but had bars on every window and sometimes there were gunshots at night. Anton ate his chocolate bar and watched her surreptitiously in glances.

“Sí,” she said casually, instantly widening the distance between them. Her Spanish was a sword that kept Anton at bay. When they were little he used to tag along behind her and beg for a way in, Teach me a word, teach me a word, but all he remembered at eleven was sí and the words for butterfly and dreamer ( mariposa, soñador ) and he wasn’t even completely sure about the word for dreamer anymore; he had moments when he thought it might actually be something else.

“Where’s your dad?” Anton’s mother asked.

Aria shrugged and sat down on the edge of the loading dock with them.

“Are you hungry, love? You want some breakfast?”

“Can I have some coffee?”

“Of course.” His mother set her half-empty mug down beside Anton and stood up in one easy motion, disappeared into the shadows of the store. Alone with Aria, he stared out at the river in silence until his mother returned with a cup of coffee. Sunday mornings were the only time when his mother was all his, and he was frankly annoyed by the intrusion.

They were quiet for a few minutes, drinking coffee in the May sunlight, and then Aria asked, “Can I have a job?”

“You want to work here at the store?” His mother sounded startled. She expended an enormous amount of energy trying to get Anton to work in the store, and succeeded only to the extent that he grudgingly pushed a damp cloth around for an hour after school and complained almost continuously while he was doing it.

Aria nodded.

“What about school?”

“After school. I meant part-time.”

“Why do you want to work here?”

“I just want to work.”

“Why do you want to work, though, sweetie? You’re young.”

“Independence,” she said. “It’s what I want.”

The torment of the afternoons. Aria arrived around four, a half-hour after Anton got home from school, and swept the store. The store was more properly a warehouse, a vast dim space filled with fantastical objects: fountains, clocks, antique furniture, ancient oak doors, ornate mirrors and enormous picture frames, old claw-foot bathtubs restored to pristine cleanliness, delicate wooden birdcages from the century before last, wardrobes, an old iron spiral staircase that ended in thin air. Sweeping the store was an immensely tricky operation that could easily take upward of an hour. He watched her while she swept, while she polished the furniture, and he was seized up by a wild inarticulate longing to touch her hair.

When Aria was done sweeping the floor and polishing a few pieces of furniture Anton’s mother always gave her twenty dollars, which was overly generous but no one had the heart to say anything about it ( it’s Aria, for God’s sake, she has no mother), and in the beginning Aria always left after that, but then she started bringing her homework and staying later and later until it was impossible not to invite her to stay for dinner, and then Anton’s father always walked her home in the dark. Or sometimes she stayed over, on a foam mattress on the living room floor, until gradually she established an outpost in the room next to Anton’s that had previously been used for storage, and then days and even weeks passed when she didn’t go home at all. His mother fussed over her, insisted that she eat breakfast, bought her clothes that fit properly. He heard his parents talking late at night, their voices a soft murmur on the other side of the thin adjoining wall to the kitchen. He gathered that Aria’s father didn’t go home very often either. Aria’s father spent all his money on long phone calls to Ecuador. Words heard through the wall: He’s come undone. Anton didn’t know exactly what this meant, but he could imagine it as he lay still in the darkness of his bedroom. He had a nightmare about a man walking down the street toward him from a great distance away; as he drew near Anton saw that he wasn’t a man at all, just an empty suit walking by itself, and then the suit started unraveling around the edges until it fell down on the pavement in a pile of shredded fabric and thread at his feet, and Anton woke up gasping and tangled up in the sheets.

A memory of his aunt: Aria’s mother, Sylvia of the silver earrings and the long silk skirts. A family dinner, Thanksgiving perhaps, less than a year before her deportation. She was drinking too much and getting louder, lapsing in and out of Spanish. Aria’s father had his arm around her; every now and again he whispered urgently in her ear but she ignored him. Anton was ten and unsure of what to do with himself. He tried to meet Aria’s eye across the table in sympathy, but Aria was closed in on herself and mortified well beyond the point of eye contact. Sylvia slammed her glass down on the table, making a point; the sound made Anton jump. The other adults were trying to accommodate her, giving her space in their conversation, not pointing out how much wine she was consuming. She turned to Anton at a moment when everyone else was talking, and he was overcome by her. The wine on her breath, her perfume, dark hair. She was beautiful.

“You think I’m a drunk,” she said confidentially.

Anton stammered something, at a loss.

“Well, I’m not.” She was already turning away from him, already lifting a glass to her lips. “I only drink in this desolate country.”

Anton’s parents owned the store long before they had a child. Their apartment was in the back, and Anton’s life transpired in the vastness of the store’s interior. Playing under antique tables, standing on chairs to talk to marble statues who wouldn’t meet his gaze, hiding behind sofas with books when he was supposed to be sweeping or polishing. But at eleven his life was changing so rapidly that he sometimes closed his eyes in the privacy of his bedroom and gripped his desk with both hands to steady himself. That was the spring when his aunt Sylvia was deported; pulled over for drunk driving in Queens on a Monday afternoon, blinking in the Ecuadoran sunlight on Tuesday morning of the following week. That was the summer when Aria arrived, circling the outskirts of Anton’s small family and then slipping in and half-stealing his parents. He would have hated her if he hadn’t already been half in awe, half in love. This was the year when certain aspects of his family’s business were gradually becoming clear to him, and it felt like waking slowly from a dream.